


carry you over fire and water

by goodmorningbeloved



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, F/M, M/M, Mentioned Past Child Abuse, Mutants/X-Men AU, Mutual Pining, in which superpowers aren't all fun and spandex, loras has a literal genetic flower crown, mutant cure politics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-29
Updated: 2016-10-02
Packaged: 2018-08-11 18:06:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 30,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7902541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodmorningbeloved/pseuds/goodmorningbeloved
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They call it a <i>school for the gifted</i>. </p><p>Theon Greyjoy, who dreams of bringing oceans down entire cities and feels that he <i>could</i>, thinks "gift" is too soft and too false of a word for the destruction his hands have wrought. He agrees to attend the school at eighteen, broke and out of other options, thinking that it's as far away from Robb Stark as he can get, that it's safer like this.</p><p>He hasn't counted on Robb showing up at the same school years later, with hands that glow as unnaturally as Theon's can control water.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. one.

**Author's Note:**

> [rubs hands like the dirty AU collector that i am] i once whined to a friend about how there wasn't enough superhero fic, and she sent back at 4am, "write one yourself then????" so here we are.
> 
> general notes:  
> -a lot of ages have been unabashedly skewered for plot purposes  
> -you don't need to have any knowledge of x-men to understand this fic, only that some people have a mutated gene (the x-gene) that gives them powers, and there's a boarding school dedicated to taking them in and training them to control their powers  
> -just to warn in advance, ramsay is part of theon's past here and will eventually show up again, but for an altered role. i won't spoil it, but there will be **no** torture/graphic violence, explicit or otherwise, hence no trigger warnings  
>  -title is from "through the dark" by one direction, ha  
> -happy reading!!

Theon wakes up in the shower and thinks to himself _I haven’t sleepwalked in years_ for all of two seconds—then a pillow smacks soundly into his face and he realizes he is, in fact, not in the shower, but simply in a very soaked bed. “Get _up_ , Greyjoy,” Jon’s saying gruffly, a sound that effectively ruins the usually-pleasant morning haze. “You’ve flooded the entire room.”

That almost makes him stay in bed just to _spite_ Jon, but being wet while wearing clothes is actually very uncomfortable. Theon sits up with a small curse, shoving waterlogged covers away and pushing himself out of the bed with little care for dignity. His socked feet land in cold water (he shudders) and his drowned phone. It makes a sad little cracking noise under his weight.

“Fuck,” he says to the floor.

Jon’s sitting on his own bed across the room, looking unamused at the state of things.

This is how his first accident went: A year ago, Jon was first assigned as his roommate and _something_ inside Theon reacted; the night Jon arrived, Theon woke up drenched, the air was hot and dry, and the entire room was flooded. In addition to his aloofness, Jon was vaguely smug and lorded it over Theon until a few days later he had a nightmare and set half of their room on fire ( _Theon_ ’s half, not-so-mysteriously enough). A month later, Bran and Arya came to the school at the same time, and their room was so irreparably damaged that they had to be relocated to a new one — at the end of the hall, surrounded by less rooms that might receive collateral damage and with specially designed floors that, Tyrion Lannister said, could withstand a tsunami if necessary. (Theon sometimes dreams it happening.) He and Jon moved into that new room with a quiet sort of acceptance for the other, the closest they've gotten to mutual respect. Since then, the incidents have become less embarrassing and more tiresome.

“So this means what I think this means?” Jon’s tone is strange — his voice is more grave than usual, still heavy from sleep, and he sounds curious and tired and very, very slightly hopeful all at once. He leans over his bed and fishes (ha) for the bucket he keeps under his bed in case of this exact situation, then tosses it over to Theon.

Theon knows what he means. There’s a matching strange feeling in his stomach, but his is a little harder to pinpoint.

Jon looks at him like _he_ knows what he’s feeling, and Theon decides he doesn’t want to analyze what Jon’s thinking or what _he_ himself is thinking.

Someone outside screams: “My _shoes_!”

If Theon squints, he can see the water leaking through the crack under the door and likely drenching the hallway outside, but he doesn’t realize how bad it is until he crouches down, touches his fingers to the water, and feels how _much_ of it is there.

This is how his ability goes: he touches water and touches what it touches. He feels the slickness of wooden floorboards, the fuzzy material of carpet, the hard edges of furniture—everything that comes into contact with water comes into contact with him. When he focuses, he realizes with a startle that he can feel nearly the entire floor of the mansion at his fingertips.

“How bad?” Jon asks.

Theon bites back a _that’s one of the most stupid things you can ask_ because he’s taking a deep breath and trying to concentrate.

People call his ability _controlling water_ , and Theon rolls his eyes every time he hears it. They don’t realize that he has control over water as much as the teachers have control over Bran’s impulsive tree climbing — that is, none. It’s easy enough to tap into the water and feel it; it’s another thing entirely to try and reign it in. Once, Robb, with curious eyes and curiouser hands running over Theon’s fingers, had asked what it was like, and Theon had told him, “It’s like trying to pull your lazy ass out of bed in the morning.”

(There’s that odd feeling again. He thinks he _knows_ but he pushes it away because it would mean—)

Trying to reign this much water in reminds him of the all the times he helped Asha pull their canoe back onto shore, but there’s a difference between trying to pull in a solid boat and trying to scoop water into a bucket. There’s so much of it and it’s _everywhere_ and he’s also starting to feel the bare feet of other students waking up and stepping into their flooded rooms. The latter distracts him, and he grits his teeth and concentrates harder, not realizing how drained he is until the door swings open and Sansa's voice commands, cracking slightly, “Theon, stop it!”

He wrenches his hand out of the water, feels the connection between him and the rest of the school, and snaps, “ _What_?” more harshly than he intends. He realizes he’s breathing hard, and definitely not just from irritation.

Sansa’s still in her pajamas, red hair tangled in a messy braid over her shoulder. She flinches a little, but the annoyance is clear on her face. They’ve never really gotten along — she’d almost left when she she first arrived and found out Theon was also at the school. “It’s seven in the morning and you’re projecting really, _really_ loud,” she says, as if he should know this. Most of their conversations — what few they have — go like this, him thinking or feeling “too loudly” and her reminding him to tone it down.

This time, instead of trying to shield, he thinks as loudly as he can, _SORRY FOR TRYING TO UNFLOOD YOUR ROOM._

Sansa’s an empath, not a telepath, so she can’t actually hear his thoughts, but judging from the sour look that crosses her features, she receives the sarcasm well enough.

“Whatever,” she huffs, and she turns and leaves. Theon feels the purposeful _thwack thwack_ of her feet on the still-wet floor.

“I’ll get Mr. Lannister,” Jon volunteers in the ensuing silence, making to get up.

“Yeah, thanks,” Theon mutters, and he stands up with the half-filled bucket in his arms. 

Loras did say something about his boyfriend’s plants needing to be watered.

 

'

 

“It happened again?” Margaery asks, all sympathetic eyes as she slides into the seat in front of him.

Theon eyes her suspiciously but doesn’t pause in forking bacon into his mouth. He just had this conversation with Tyrion half an hour ago and he’s not keen on repeating it with her, of all people. He wonders if he can keep his mouth stuffed the entire time she tries to converse with him, she'll eventually give up.

The dining hall is as busy as it can be for a school of teenagers with freakish powers. He sits at his usual table near the back, where the only people who ever sit with him are a woman named Brienne whose last name Theon does know but whose powers Theon _does_ know include enough strength to punch a hole through a brick wall with her bare hands, Loras Tyrell whenever he felt like it, Renly Baratheon whenever Loras was there, and Jon whenever his group of friends were in a training session. This list does not include Margaery Tyrell.

“Sansa said you nearly blacked yourself out trying to clean up the water,” Margaery goes on, tucking her hair behind her ear. She’s attractive like the girls Theon used to flirt with before, but he's always been wary of her tongue — literally. He’s never seen it firsthand, but he knows that her ability has something to do with the power of suggestion. (There’s a rumor that she talked a cab driver into driving her all the way out to the school for free.) (But then there’s another rumor that she paid that same cab driver five times the normal fare.)

Theon is absolutely not surprised to hear that Sansa has told Margaery less than two hours after their encounter — since Margaery came to the school, they’ve spent a good amount of time sitting close with heads bowed together in private gossip. He normally doesn’t care about what they say to each other about him (and normally Margaery doesn’t sit next to him unless she’s forced to), but that’s a bit morbidly interesting — he’d been close to blacking out? “I was just cleaning up after myself,” he said, the corner of his mouth lifting into a lazy smile. “And you all say I never give.”

“It’s not giving when you were the cause of the problem in the first place.” Margaery smiles through the subtle jibe. “But that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

Theon licks bacon grease off his fork pointedly. “To smile while subtly insulting me?”

Margaery ignores this. “Sansa tells me you last had this…gushing incident when _she_ arrived here,” she says, and her tone turns almost sweetly _threatening._ Theon almost laughs derisively and tells her, _Don’t worry, you’ve got the wrong Stark,_ but it’s fleeting and Margaery goes on, “And Jon tells me you had the same reaction when Bran and Arya arrived, and Jon himself before that—“

“Are you interrogating him without me?”

Theon’s never been that glad to see Loras before, even if Renly’s not close behind and that means they’ll be fawning over each other.

“Loras!” Margaery’s smile actually becomes a little more genuine as her brother and his boyfriend sit down to occupy the seats beside her. Down the table, he hears Brienne mutter something under her breath. 

“Hey Theon.” Renly smiles in greeting. Theon admittedly knows little about him except that their abilities are slightly similar, though he’s more oriented to the weather. He’s also one of those people who seem genuinely nice and subsequently confuses the hell out of Theon. (He reminds him of Robb sometimes.)

“Hi,” Theon says. If it sounds awkward, Renly doesn’t point it out and starts eating instead.

“So what are we interrogating him about?” Loras asks as he cuts into his food. There are white asters in his hair today — a physical manifestation of his mutation that’s always fascinated and baffled Theon.

“I think she’s getting back at me for drowning her shoes this morning,” Theon tells him.

Margaery shakes her head. “Actually, those were Arya’s new training shoes. I’d watch out for holes in _your_ shoes tonight, if I were you.”

“Or holes in your, you know, general being,” Loras adds, because, right, Theon did see Arya swinging something that looked suspiciously like a sword just a few days ago.

“ _Anyway_ ,” Margaery says, regaining hold of the conversation, “I was trying to ask you what you think about another Stark joining us.” She’s looking straight at him. He stares back, masks his reaction so well that he doubted even Sansa could have been able to tell what he was feeling. “You know,” she says conversationally, “since you’re so attuned to them, and all.”

“Just because Jon’s my roommate doesn’t mean I give a shit about him or his family,” Theon says dryly, stabbing his fork into another slice of bacon.

“Odd. Sansa keeps mentioning your history with that brother of hers.”

Margaery’s eyes are positively _glittering_ and the only reason Theon doesn’t get up and walk away is because that would only prove her right. He settles for chewing his food a little harder than necessary.

“Which one do you think it is, then?” She elbows Loras slightly, and Loras looks over from some joke he’d been sharing with Renly.

“What?” he asks, and Margaery sighs and repeats her question.

“There’s only two of them left, isn’t there? The oldest and that five year old?”

Margaery nods even though she must have known that already. Theon wonders if she drew this information out from Sansa using her ability or if Sansa freely confided the information. “Sansa mentioned that her mother would never let little Rickon leave the house at such a young age, even if his mutation’s kicked in, so…” She pauses.  _For dramatics_ , Theon thinks. “Do you think Robb Stark will be here by the end of the day?”

They don’t understand anything, is the problem. Whatever Margaery’s heard from Sansa is what Sansa will have heard from Robb, and Robb still doesn’t know everything either—Theon had very carefully made sure of that, even when Jon’s arrival had threatened to ruin his plan, even when Bran’s and Arya’s and eventually Sansa’s arrivals made it even harder. At least  the thousand miles between him and Robb Stark had their intended effect, and Theon hasn't spoken to him in two years. He doesn't know what Sansa thinks of him and he doesn't care, but he does care a little bit about what Robb thinks, and he nearly asks. It must be nothing nice. ( That's all right; it's a small price to pay.)

He musters the will to really get up this time and walk away, but Margaery isn’t too far behind.

“What is your _problem_?” he snarks when she steps in front of him, at the same time she says, “If it’s Robb Stark and one day I walk in on Sansa _upset_ that you’ve hurt her brother again, we will have words.”

“I prefer my death threats blunt,” he bites back, and he steps around her and walks off and this time she doesn’t follow.

 

'

 

This is how history goes: He was seventeen and Robb was newly sixteen and Theon kissed him when he was feeling a little brave under the bleachers on the day of his graduation ceremony. It sounds so sickeningly like something out of a movie that he wants to scrub it from his memory.

He’s tried—for reasons a little deeper than that. But it was Robb, and that meant he remembered everything about it instead.

Life’s funny like that, he thinks. Try to forget about someone, and you’re thinking about them at least once a day; try to run away from them, and suddenly they and their absurd amount of siblings is living in the same vicinity as you—

“So you think it’s going to be Robb?” Jon asks from the doorway.

—and their half-brother is your roommate.

Theon tells him to shut up, because he knows Jon texts Robb every day and he’s fully capable of asking him himself, which turns into an argument and Jon’s fingers glowing red-orange and one of the teachers has to come by and break it up before it escalates into another burnt room.

 

'

 

In hindsight, sulking in his _shared_ room probably wasn’t the best of ideas. After he’s let off with a stern warning, he grabs his charcoals and sketchbook and storms out of the mansion instead. He’s vaguely aware of the several flooded vases that he leaves in his wake, which he’ll feel guilty about later.

He sits himself under some giant ugly tree and realizes he should have grabbed pencils instead because the charcoal will smear all over the paper, but he ends up not drawing anyway, just puts them aside and pulls out his phone instead. The thing barely survived the drowning, and the fact that a few of its keys don’t work now only makes it more pitiful.

He presses his lips together in a tight line as he opens a new text message for an old thread. It’s a challenge to type out a message with broken keys, but he manages.

 

_ To: Robb Stark _

_H hyo ‘re one hell of   l te bloomer_

 

He thumbs the send button and watches the send status blink with bated breath. It’s ridiculous; he’s had his service cut off for years now and all of his messages to Robb are outlined in red to signify that they can’t be sent, but every time he sends one, he still feels a little bit of fear that one will get through somehow and the floodgates will open.

He eventually puts his phone aside too.

This is how his ability goes: He can feel the moisture in the air. When the school first found him and took him in, the woman who had assessed his powers said that his control over his mutation was spectacular and asked how he had honed his powers without formal training. She already somehow knew that his powers had manifested when he was nine years old, but she didn’t know that ever since he found out he could also feel the minuscule water molecules in the air, he’d use his mutation to keep track of when his father and his brothers were nearby. He didn’t tell her he had to learn to discern their presence that way so he could stay out of the house during bad nights.

He didn’t tell her that he came to learn to discern the Starks’ presence because Robb never felt shy about letting him come over those nights. He didn’t tell her that after he left home, he never slept in one place without first making sure that he couldn’t feel any familiar presences nearby, especially Robb's. 

When the same woman pulled him aside after the flooding incident that marked Jon’s arrival, he certainly didn’t tell her that Jon’s presence had set off years’ worth of carefully-laid mental traps and alarms.

He’s not sure why he’s had this reaction so early. (He thinks some part of him is still attuned to the Stark household, miles and miles away, the familiar air of a house he'd spent so many nights at.)

_Maybe it_ is _Rickon_ , he thinks. Then he thinks, _Fat chance._ He knew Robb’s mother held onto all of her children tightly, but Rickon was probably the second favored as the youngest child. 

Tyrion Lannister’s School for the Gifted finds more students one of three different ways: they reach out to the students, the students come to them, or the parents’ students come to them. Last time Theon saw Rickon, he was just beginning to form words; whether the school contacted the Starks or otherwise, he couldn’t imagine Catelyn Stark consenting to sending the kid off so far from home.

_But if it’s Robb,_ he thinks. From the research he’s done, mutations typically appear in childhood, usually triggered by some significant event or trauma. He hasn’t heard of many that manifest beyond eighteen years, and—

_He’ll be eighteen now_ , he realizes, and then: _No, not yet, in three days._ He managed to stop himself from wondering how Robb might look now, if his limbs still look a little awkward for his body or if any of his freckles will have faded away or—

He glares at the mansion up ahead, like it’s somehow to blame for this ridiculous situation. How was _he_ supposed to know that nearly all of the Stark children would all end up with mutations?

_It’s fine_ , he tells himself finally. It only means that some plans will have to occur sooner than others.

 

'

 

As one of the older students of the school, it’s his turn to lead a danger room session that night. His sessions focus on environments and teaching the younger kids to use their surroundings in tandem with their abilities, and this time the room transforms into a beach. They’re sectioned off by the wide blue ocean, the treeline, and the wreckage of a submarine, and Theon shivers when he feels the cool wind. It's places like this that he feels right at home.

The danger room was built by the school’s resident genius and was capable of simulating scenes so realistically that when Theon bends down grab a handful of sand, he feels every coarse grain even through his gloves. Of course, the ocean doesn’t feel quite as real, but he knows it is programmed to respond to him the way it does in reality.

“All right,” he says, barely managing to sound bored. He rarely gets assigned the same exact group of students, but he’s been doing sessions long enough that he’s had almost all of them. He realizes that this group has been specifically picked. He recognizes two boys whose mutations are linked to earth materials, a girl who can conjure explosives from her fingertips, and, amusingly enough, Jon.

“You know how this goes,” Theon says, and he knows they know because he’s trained with them at least once before. “Five medallions hidden somewhere and fifteen minutes to work together and find them without getting killed by whatever the danger room decides to throw at you.”

In the case of newer trainees, they use simulated enemies that can’t leave physical damages. For students who have passed an ability check, they tend to bring out the very physical robots who could leave very physical injuries. 

Today, it’s clearly the latter.

“There are two points to this session: one, to teach you to get your head out of your asses once in a while and admit when you need help. Two, to make sure you know how to handle yourself when you are, literally, not in your element.” He tries not to sound bored as he gestures to the sand and water around them. He jokes around more when his team _doesn’t_ include Jon, but his mood’s also dampened by…well, other things. “I’m here to keep time and make sure you don’t kill each other instead. Go.”

Jon’s turned around before he even says “go,” that little shit. The others break into a sprint behind him, and Theon follows at a more leisurely pace towards the treeline.

Then—it _happens._

This is how it feels: One moment it’s quiet, and the next moment he feels something rip. It’s nothing tangible — if he could describe a rip in the air, that might be it, a quick jab of sharpness that reminds him of his last year in high school, trusting Robb to yank off a bandaid from his back _quick, do it quick_ , and suddenly he’s aware of the moisture in the air and the vast, vast ocean, all this water and _power_ at his disposal that makes him dizzy—

He doesn’t know when the waves began to recede but when he turns, stumbling, the ocean has reared back into a behemoth of a wave that shouldn’t be possible, and as it crashes down on their little island he hears someone call over the intercom, “Theon, _Theon_ , control y—“ 

The water slams into him hard in the same instant the danger room must shift, because he lands on a smooth metal floor instead of sand. _It’s not real_ , he tells his frenzied heart over and over, _not real, not real_ , but then he raises a hand to his face and realizes he’s soaked. 

The next thing he becomes aware of is the sound of distant coughing, and when he turns to the right, he sees the rest of his group brought down to their knees, shivering in puddles of cold water.

The air is parched.

“Theon?” the same crackling voice demands over the intercom, and he realizes it’s Tyrion Lannister, sounding genuinely concerned about him for once. “Try to calm down. Your vitals are all over the place—“

He knows, he _knows_ what happened. He’s never experienced it like that before, because it’s never been the one person whom he’d willingly attuned himself to—

He can’t explain, but apparently he doesn’t need to; the room’s doors slide open, and he doesn’t care that he’s leaving wet footprints as he walks out.

_Things not packed yet still have my sketchbook in the kitchen but that’s okay got my wallet in the bag could grab the book on my way down no through the back he can’t_ see _—_

But the only way out of the sublevel is through a specific elevator, and that elevator only goes up to the main floor to prevent kids wandering in from their bedrooms down to the danger room. Later, he’ll tell himself he was stupid to think he could actually pull it off.

The elevator door opens and he’s safe for a moment because none of the students staring at him actually matter. He glowers at a few of them as he makes his way towards the stairs, but the stairs are in front of the front doors, and the front doors are already opening by the time he crosses the foyer. 

Sansa steps inside first, followed by Margaery, and they’re laughing and chattering as they each tug a suitcase behind them. Theon doesn’t have time to regret stopping to look, because an instant later, Robb is also stepping inside, and he— He looks so similar but also so _different_ , clad in plain colors with rain in his hair that Theon is closely feel. He’s smiling, eyes on his sister, expression soft until his gaze wanders over and lands on Theon, paused at the bottom of the banister.

Sansa and Margaery don’t even seem to notice them, and Theon barely hears Robb’s small “Theon?” over their talking. He doesn’t stick around to listen harder; he turns and bolts.


	2. two.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Robb arrives, something catches on fire, and roommates are agreed upon.

Robb wakes up to the car slowing down over gravel, and he lifts his head from where it’s been leaning uncomfortably against the cold window. It must be in the late evening — the car’s clock is horribly off — though there’s enough light for him to discern Tyrion Lannister’s School for the Gifted among the trees.

It’s huge. He’s visited big houses before, places belonging to the high-end families that his father dealt with, but none of them have looked quite like _this,_ intimidating and welcoming and aloof and warm all at once. He loses count of the windows, each one lit up by gold light that gives its brick walls a rusty red glow, and decides that _mansion_ is the only word he can find for it. When he climbs out of the car, he sees the long path they have driven along, lit up by streetlights emanating the same gold light, all the way back to an iron gate.

The sight of the light makes his hands fidget.

“Home sweet home, kid,” the driver says as he gets out after him. He’s a dark-haired man with enough scars to make Catelyn Stark eye him imperiously when he first led Robb out to the car that morning. Bronn, he’d introduced himself. His words now make Robb shift uneasily. 

It isn’t the first time he’s been called that, but he withholds the automatic response of, _I’m not a kid_. He learned a long time ago that no one believes you if you have to defend yourself.

Besides, Bronn looks like the kind of person who would call someone _his_ age a kid.

He, apparently, is also the kind of person who simply opens the trunk for Robb to grab his bags without making a move to help him. Not that Robb minds. Earlier, when his mother demanded to know how she could trust him, the man had rolled his eyes, held up his hands, and said, “I’m just the driver.” Robb had taken that to mean that Bronn was like his mother and father and Rickon ( _and himself, just the day before_ ): a human.

Two hours later, in the midst of a rather eventful pit stop, Robb watched, terrified, as Bronn scared away two thugs with three sharp metal _claws_ that slithered out from the skin of his knuckles.

Robb tells himself now that he’s wary because he likes his bag without holes. 

(In truth, he doesn’t know if he’s more wary of what Bronn can do with those claws, or what _he’ll_ do to defend himself against them.)

Bronn whistles lowly. “We ought to put all of you Starks on your own floor,” he comments.

Robb looks up from the trunk at the comment and finds that Bronn’s gaze is directed at the mansion. When he follows his line of sight, he sees two figures coming out of the huge front doors, hears their laughter as they hurry down the front steps.

He recognizes Sansa as soon as the glow of the lights catches her hair, and he feels something close to homesickness lurch in his stomach. He brings out the suitcases and barely has time to make sure his gloves are secure before Sansa is flinging her arms around him. 

He can’t help it: He flinches at the contact and almost pushes her off, but one, two, seconds later, she’s still hugging him and nothing’s happening, and slowly, carefully, he allows himself to hug her back.

“You’re _taller_!” she laughs into his neck, and he finds his anxiousness melting away almost completely at the sound. Gods, he thinks with a sudden aching, he’s missed her, he’s missed Jon and Arya and Bran—

“You’re redder,” he returns without missing a beat, grinning now.

“Oh, like _you_ have room to talk.” She pulls back to muss his hair like _she_ ’s the older one, and he rolls his eyes. He notices that she’s red-cheeked, slightly out of breath.

Somewhere behind them, Bronn grunts. Robb glances back. “Is that you?” he asks, looking a little flushed himself. Robb doesn’t understand at first, but he realizes that Bronn is looking at his sister.

“Oh!” Sansa’s face turns a little redder in embarrassment, and she steps away completely. Without her taking up his vision, Robb finally notices the other girl who had accompanied Sansa, a brunette who looks back at him withopen fascination. She, he notices, has a faint flush to her cheeks too. “Yes, sorry. It’s just…” Sansa looks at him suddenly, poking his shoulder. “I forget how your emotions tend to go everywhere—“

“Excuse me?” he asks, pretending to be affronted.

“—though they’ve never been this awful before, wow—“

“Awful?” He realizes that Sansa must be perceiving his moods and accidentally projecting it to the others. Guiltily (and a little self-consciously), he tries to rein in his emotions the way he used to when Sansa first developed her abilities. He thinks he’s successful when her expression relaxes.

“Awful in a nice way.” Her smile is genuine. “We thought you might have died having to deal with Rickon by yourself.” She pokes him in the shoulder again. The mention of _we_ sends more pangs of homesickness ringing in his chest. Maybe it won’t be so bad being away from home if he’s got some of it here, too, he thinks.

“If you’re going to stay out here and chat, can you get the rest of your bags out of the trunk so I can leave,” Bronn says plainly.

Robb takes out his last bag and slings it over his shoulder, then pushes the trunk shut.

“Thanks. Have fun with your reunion. Try not to broadcast it to the rest of the mansion.”

“Nice guy,” Robb comments as Bronn gets back into the car and wastes no time driving off, leaving them standing on the gravel.

“He’s better in a fight.” This time it’s the other girl who speaks. She finally steps forward and puts a hand out. “Since Sansa doesn’t seem keen on introducing me, hi, I’m Margaery.” If silk had a sound, Robb thinks, it would sound like Margaery’s voice.

“I was going to,” Sansa protests half-heartedly. She’s still flushing, Robb notices with some interest, but he’s still shielding his emotions, so it can’t be because of him.

He looks between them.

Then he shakes Margaery’s hand, a little stiffly at first but relaxing when it turns out to be a normal handshake. “Robb,” he says, and when he smiles it’s a little more tempered than the one he’d given Sansa. The school is supposed to be full of people with mutations ( _people like me_ , he tells himself for the nth time, but he can’t wrap his mind around that phrase, can’t imagine that now he’s supposed to be different than the way he’s been for nearly eighteen years), and even though everything he read about it lauded its _safety_ and _security_ and _fostering environment,_ he can’t help but be wary of what _their_ hands might be capable of.

“I know.” Margaery smiles back. “My grandmother’s familiar with your family business.”

“Oh. Margaery Tyrell?” He’s heard of her family before, their name regularly splashed across headlines as the benefactors of the latest charity for mutants.

Margaery looks pleased that he made the connection, but Sansa cuts in before they get any further: “You two can’t think of something more exciting to talk about than business?”

Margaery chuckles and shakes her head slightly. “We came because we figured you’d need help with your things,” she tells Robb. “Let’s go inside?”

The idea sounds _really_ good, actually. “Yeah, let me get my bags.”

“Oh, Sansa and I can handle these.” Margaery smiles at him. She and Sansa take up the suitcases before he can protest, and he falls a little behind them as they begin walking towards the mansion. “Relax. You’re probably exhausted from the drive.”

Robb wants to say that he wasn’t even the one who drove, but now that she’s mentioned it, he _does_ feel tired. “I’m supposed to talk to Mr. Lannister. Would you mind taking me to him?”

“What, this late?” Sansa looks back at him, disappointed. “Bran wanted to see you.”

And Robb wants to see Bran, but Mr. Lannister’s request had sounded compulsory…

“Tyrion’s supervising a danger room session,” Margaery says airily, as if Robb is supposed to know what she’s talking about. “Those always stress him out, don’t they, Sansa?”

“Sometimes I think he lets his shields drop on purpose,” Sansa agrees grudgingly as they ascend the stairs, “and calls it practice for me and other telepaths, or something. He probably wouldn’t mind if you saw him in the morning instead.”

“He might thank you for it, even,” Margaery adds.

It sounds like a good idea…and he _does_ really want to see the rest of his siblings. He’s surprised that the thought of directly going against Mr. Lannister’s request doesn’t bother him as much as it normally would. “All right,” he says slowly.

He almost runs into them when they stop suddenly at the top of the stairs.

“Whoa,” Sansa says, looking at Margaery with unabashed awe. “I’ve never seen anyone convince my brother to break a rule.”

Margaery stares back at her curiously. “What do you… Oh!” She seems to realize something. “No, I’m not… I wasn’t doing anything, really!” Robb effectively feels stranded from the conversation.

Sansa looks unconvinced. “When you said he must be exhausted, he started feeling so tired that _I_ wanted to lie down and sleep.”

“What, on the grass like that?” Margaery asks, equal parts amused and fond.

Robb wonders, _Are they flirting in front of me?_ Yet another thing to feel clueless about.

“No,” Margaery continues, “I really wasn’t doing anything. You asked me not to, remember?”

“I’m sorry, but I’m lost,” Robb finally interjects, trying not to sound as uneasy as he feels.

Sansa looks like she just remembered that he’s still there. “Right. Margaery’s a, uh…”

“Silvertongue,” Margaery supplies. “Sorry, I _did_ forget that in my introduction, didn’t I.”

“Silvertongue,” he repeats, deciding he doesn’t know what this piece of information means or what to do with it.

“She has the power of suggestion,” Sansa clarifies further. “You remember _Ella Enchanted_ , right? She could make everyone else act like Ella.”

“That’s not quite the same thing.” Margaery looks more amused at the idea of _him_ understanding the reference. (He does.) 

Sansa continues, “I think she slipped earlier, and that’s probably why you agreed to see Mr. Lannister in the morning…but what we said _is_ true, you know, you _could_ see him in the morning…”

“Sansa, do you really think I _slipped_?” 

He feels a familiar buzzing beginning to cluster in the back of his head. He loses track of the conversation, mind still stuck on _silvertongue_ and _power of suggestion_ and _is that why I feel so tired? Because she told me I was?_

The uneasiness threatens to swell into queasiness as he fully realizes what it could mean. _She could make me do anything?_ he thinks. _Feel anything?_ He barely remembers to throw his shields up so that Sansa doesn’t pick up on the prickle of fear. Margaery looks nice enough, he thinks, but he’s also racking his brain for every word she said to him. _Does she look nice or did she convince me she looks nice?_

Then, uglier thoughts: _Has she convinced Sansa that she—_

The sound of laughter brings him out of his thoughts, and he realizes that the girls have opened the door and walked inside the mansion. Instinctively, he puts on a smile as if he heard their joke and walks in after them.

The interior looks less extravagant than he expected, but still austere enough to make his breath hitch. He spies couches and cushions set up, complimented by wooden decor and teeming vases of flowers. A glass chandelier hangs above them ( _with real candles?_ ), though there are also sconces lining the walls, emitting the same soft shade of gold. (He burrows his hands further into his pockets.) He registers movement: Two staircases frame the foyer, and above, a couple of students run past ( _one with blue skin?_ ), and below… Below, someone paused by the first step, a face, a familiar one, dark eyes and dark hair and—

“Theon?” he manages, and his mind _reels_. The syllables are barely out of his mouth before the boy in question is turning tail and running, gone so quickly that Robb is left with only a fading impression of his face in his mind and a faint thought of, _Did I really just see that?_

“Ouch, _Robb_.” Sansa’s laughter cuts off as she turns to him in concern. “What _is_ that, it felt like my heart just got ripped out—“

“Theon’s here?” he asks— no, demands, really. He doesn’t mean to sound so terse, but he thinks he’s allowed to want answers when… When Theon has apparently lived in the same place as his brothers and sisters and no one told him—

“Robb.”

—not even Jon, who _just_ talked to him that morning, how long has Theon been here and _why did no one tell me_ —

“Robb,” Margaery says, this time, and her voice has the impression of a hand smoothing over wrinkled sheets, “I think you need to calm—“

“No!” The single word leaves his mouth not quite as a shout, but not quite as a calm refusal either. “ _Don’t_ — Don’t tell me what to feel.”

He thinks he catches hurt flicker across Margaery’s expression, and guilt immediately joins the amalgam of feelings swirling in his stomach. Sansa’s eyes have flown wide and she fixes him a horrified look; he scrambles to shield his thoughts. “Robb, she wouldn’t do that!”

“I’m sorry,” he mutters weakly, unable to meet their eyes. His mood has effectively been soured. “I— I’m gonna go.”

He’ll find Mr. Lannister, tell him that he’s changed his mind, and… _And what, you’ll just never touch anyone again?_ a voice asks him. It sounds so much like Theon that he imagines building more and more walls around his thoughts and looks around as if he can spot a telepath. A few students, most who look his age or even younger, have stopped to watch them. He’s not sure if it’s the sight of his bags, sitting forgotten on the floor, or him, terrified, hands half-raised as if they could physically stop anyone from getting into his head, gloves doing nothing to hide the pulsing glow of his palms.

He doesn’t even remember putting his hands up. 

Is that why Margaery has placed herself in front of Sansa?

“Robb,” she says evenly. “I promise you, I didn’t use my powers on you, and I’m sorry if it made you uncomfortable.” Her words sound genuine enough, but he senses resentment in her face too, like this isn’t the first time she’s had to say this. “But if you don’t calm yourself down, _I_ might have to.”

“Margaery,” Sansa protests. 

“I’m gonna go,” he repeats, and he really does go this time. He doesn’t know _where_ , just not up the stairs where Theon had gone, so he simply turns in the opposite direction and begins walking.

Two steps later, the elevator at the end of the hall opens, and out storms his brother. That’s a half literal statement: Jon is in some kind of black-and-yellow uniform, wearing that expression he wears when he’s hell-bent on doing something, soaked and angry. Robb slows down and eventually stops altogether, but Jon’s pace is relentless, and he brushes past Robb entirely.

“Where did he go?” He seems to miss Robb completely, addressing Sansa and Margaery instead.

“Who?” Margaery snaps.

“Theon,” Jon snaps back.

And Robb remembers that he’s pissed about that and reaches out to get his attention. “Hey—“ 

His first two fingers touch Jon’s wet shoulder, and the chandelier roars up in flames. Startled squeals erupt from the small audience they’ve attracted, almost drowning out Jon’s noise of surprise. 

Robb’s hand flies to his head when the buzzing suddenly solidifies into sharp, too-real pain.

“ _Robb_?” he hears Jon ask.

_ALL OF YOU, CALM DOWN,_ a new voice bellows. Or, it _feels_ like a bellow, loud and close to his ears. Maybe it’s the reason why Robb has to prop himself up against the wall, why the world seems to spin, and why sleeping sounds like the best idea at the moment.

In the distance, he hears glass shattering.

“What a mess,” someone sighs. It sounds like Margaery.

Yeah, really.

 

‘

 

This is what he dreams of: standing under the bleachers, a field of grass that stretches out endlessly under his feet, Theon saying goodbye instead of giving him his first kiss.

The air is dry.

“Again?” Robb demands.

“Where did your legendary patience go, huh?” Theon’s voice says, although the Theon in front of him now isn’t moving his mouth.

Robb doesn’t understand what he means. He doesn’t get to ask.

“The tide’s coming up,” Theon says. This time his mouth does move. He looks somewhere to their left, a smile playing faintly on his lips. 

Robb sees nothing through the slits of the bleachers except green, green, green.

“You’re a prick,” Robb tells him, the way he’s dreamed of doing so for years.

Theon shakes his head and chuckles, turning back to kneel on the grass. “Help me move the towels,” he says, like he hasn’t heard a single thing that’s been said to him, “or we’ll get soaked.”

His hands fold over invisible towels over invisible sand, and that’s how the rest of the dream goes, Theon simply folding his hands again and again until Robb wonders if he’s trying to roll the very world out from under his feet—

 

‘

 

“What a mess,” Arya laughs in his face when he wakes up in the infirmary for the second time in a week. 

She’s older—that’s the first thing Robb notices, and probably not that astutely. Of course she’s older. Her hair is cut shorter, a shade darker than what he remembers, and she comes up to Sansa’s shoulders now. Her grin, though, hasn’t changed at all.

He tries to sit up a little and winces when his head throbs.

“What did you get?” Bran crowds his left side, nearly leaning out of his wheelchair. He’s changed too. Most of the baby fat has worn off of his face, and his hair has grown shaggier, almost as thick as Arya’s.

Robb doesn’t understand what he means for a moment. He feels sluggish everywhere, even his thoughts, and he doesn’t realize Bran is reaching for his hand until his younger brother has grasped his fingers. “Fire, too?”

“No, I heard it was Jon who set the chandelier on fire,” Arya tells him.

“Jon set the chandelier on fire?” Robb mumbles after them.

“I set the chandelier on fire,” Jon says grimly, perched on the empty bed next to his.

“This isn’t exactly how I imagined us reuniting,” Sansa says. She’s standing behind Arya, arms crossed loosely over her chest. He wonders if she’s angry with him, but if she is, she’s hiding it well. Margaery is nowhere in sight. _Good,_ he thinks, then feels guilty for thinking it.

“No,” Arya says with a roll of her eyes, “Rickon’s not here, and neither are Mother and Father.”

“Robb, what did you get?” Bran persists over his sisters’ bickering, looking annoyed that his question hasn’t been addressed.

Robb isn’t sure what to tell him. He holds up his hands — free of his gloves, though he doesn’t feel a spike of panic at that — and presents them to Bran. Bran’s eyes light up, and he leans in further. (Jon sighs and pushes his wheelchair closer so he doesn’t end up toppling out of it.)

A few seconds later, when nothing has happened, their younger brother asks, “Well, what do they do?”

“Oh,” Robb says when he realizes his hands are a very normal shade of flesh, “sometimes they glow.” He blinks, hazily. “Jon, am I on drugs?”

“Mr. Lannister probably ‘smoothed out’ your mind, is all,” Arya answers for him. “I heard that feels close to drugs. So, wait, you have flashlight hands?”

Before Robb can ask _what_ the hell it means to “smooth” out his mind, Bronn comes into view at the foot of the bed. His dark hair and dark clothes stick out sorely against the infirmary’s backdrop of white, but nothing looks as out of place as the packs of chocolate pudding in his arms.

“Oh, _no_ ,” he says when Arya spots him, “for the last time, these are for the bedridden.”

Robb catches the slightest of smirks from Jon. He can practically hear him quipping, _So, how’s it feel to be_ bedridden _, Robb?_

Lousy. It feels lousy. 

“Robb doesn’t even like pudding,” Arya grumbles when Bronn tosses one over. Robb catches it clumsily, then passes it to his sister.

Bronn grunts. “You lot are impossible.” Then he moves on, presumably to give out the other packs.

“Hey, where’s a spoon?” Arya wanders away after the man.

“I missed you, Robb,” Bran says earnestly. For all he’s changed, he still looks young, harmless, not at all like he once dreamt with frightening accuracy that Robb would sprain his ankle during a match.

Robb smiles at them all. Maybe it’s the sluggishness that lets him relax against the pillows and think about nothing else. “Yeah, I missed you guys too.”

Bran and Arya jump into stories about what he’s missed since he last called them, their voices overlapping almost as often as they fight over who gets to tell which parts. Sansa tells him that Margaery is sorry for last night. Jon tells him that he’s been asleep for about thirteen hours and that, at one point, his heartbeat had slowed to the point where they thought he was dead.

“I knew you weren’t, though,” Bran tells him.

“Glad to know _one_ of you has some faith in me,” Robb says with a slight grin. 

“Well, I wouldn’t say that. I just had a vision of you, so I knew you _had_ to be alive for it to come true.”

When did Bran develop a wit?

“I take it back, I’m not glad for any of you at all,” Robb says. He sits up a little. “Did you say you had a vision of me?”

“Really? That’s not what you were feeling when you got here.” Sansa smirks.

“ _Oh, I missed my brothers and sisters so much!”_ Arya swoons. Obviously, she’s heard this from Sansa already. “ _I haven’t seen them in so long, oh!”_

His question gets lost in the ensuing banter, and he forgets about it eventually too. Bran stops giving him knowing looks, and Robb lets himself fall back into the natural rhythm of being with his siblings.

 

‘

 

His next visitor is Tyrion Lannister himself. “Feeling rested?” the man asks after he introduces himself and puts off all of Robb’s attempts to apologize for the previous night. 

His expression suggests that he really is interested in the answer, which…isn’t quite what Robb expects from, supposedly, the most powerful mutant on the world. But he has to care, doesn’t he? He can’t be running a school for a hundred mutant kids if he doesn’t care at least a little bit.

“I feel fine,” Robb says.

Tyrion gives him a bemused look. “You’re sure?”

Robb remembers something about the man’s telepathy and feels his cheeks heat up a little. _Can he tell I’m lying?_ Still, he insists, “I’m sure.”

Tyrion’s look lingers, but he doesn’t push. “All right. We have three things to discuss, then.” His tone doesn’t sound convinced at all. Robb feels lousier, mostly at himself. “The room we prepared for you is unfortunately being occupied by a pair of students whose rooms were damaged in an accident.” Robb tenses. “Don’t worry,” Tyrion says, like he expected that, “I’m not talking about the chandelier, though _that_ will need repairs too…” He trails off for a moment, resigned. “We typically have students rooming by themselves or in pairs, but since we are now a room short, we may have to temporarily put you with an existing pair.”

“That’s fine,” Robb says quickly. Now that most of the sluggishness has faded, the less-pleasant thoughts have resurfaced. Among them are guilt and a keenness to make up for last night’s chaos. “I can stay with Jon and his roommate.” It’s probably the safest option.

Tyrion looks surprised at it.

“Jon’s my half-brother,” Robb tries to explain. “We used to share a room, so it won’t be that different.”

“No, no, that’s not it, I simply…” Tyrion shakes his head. “You do know about his roommate, though, correct?”

“Jon’s told me about him before. He…can control water, right? I used to know someone else who can do that, so…it won’t be anything I haven’t seen before.” _Used to know?_ he thinks. _When does it become present-tense again?_ Should _it be present-tense now?_

Tyrion’s expression is now pensive, and Robb wishes he could tell what he’s thinking. “All right,” the man says finally, and Robb exhales soundlessly in relief. “If you insist.”

“I do,” he says, in case it’s not clear.

“Well!” Tyrion claps his hand together, a sharp sound that elicits an annoyed moan from one of the other students in the beds. “That works out perfectly, actually. Now, there’s just a matter of your schedule, but…” He glances around them pointedly. “I think that can wait until after you do some adjusting.”

“But you’ll teach me, right?” Robb blurts. He feels rude for doing so, but his father’s words are ringing in his ears— _I know you’ll make us proud—_ and it’s been on his mind since he said his goodbyes to his parents.

“Literature and current events?” Tyrion grins. “Yes, those are my classes. History and science and mathematics, I’m afraid, are left to our senior staff, but you needn’t worry. They’re all certified to teach.”

“Yes,” Robb says, caught off-guard by the response. “I just… I guess I meant— My, um…” He clasps his hands together lightly. “My…mutation. You’ll help me control it?”

_Whatever it is_.

“First we’ll have to pinpoint exactly _what_ your mutation is,” Tyrion says, nodding. “But yes, of course, we’ll teach you that too. Did the brochure not make it clear enough?”

Then Robb worries that he’s somehow insulted the most powerful mutant in the world, but he realizes that Tyrion is grinning again.

“I’m _kidding_ , Stark. I know how garish that brochure is. I approved it myself.”

Robb stares at him.

“Right,” Tyrion says, now a little awkwardly, “I probably shouldn’t call you Stark when there are five of you running around here, or that might get confusing.”

“Right,” Robb echoes.

Tyrion smiles at him. “I’m glad we’re on the same page. Now, you’re free to go whenever you feel like it, just make sure you sign out on that clipboard on the desk so Pod doesn’t think you’ve teleported to another dimension.”

Because that’s just a _thing_ that can happen around here.

“Wait,” Robb says when the man turns, “you said we had to talk about three things?”

Tyrion chuckles. “I miscounted. Don’t worry about it.” He advises further, “Don’t worry too much about what you can do either, all right? I’ve had students who can shoot lasers from their eyes.” He wiggles his fingers by his temple, as if to mimic it. “You aren’t the worst, I assure you, and whatever you can do—you’ll learn how to control it.”

“Thank you, Mr. Lannister.” Robb hopes his gratitude is evident.

Tyrion quirks a brow at the title. “You could do to loosen up a little, Mr. Stark.”

Robb looks down at his hands. “That’s my father,” he tells him. “Just Robb is fine.”

“And Mr. Lannister is my father,” Tyrion returns. He throws over his shoulder as he leaves, “I hope to see you up and about later, Robb.”

 

‘

 

Tyrion turns out to be his last visitor. Robb tells himself he wasn’t waiting for anyone else.

 

‘

 

“You’re crazy.” Bronn is grinning from where he’s standing behind Tyrion’s desk, and Tyrion sighs and regrets giving him a skeleton key and express permission to come into his office whenever he’d like.

“A very original insult,” he says dryly, penciling in the last of his notes on their newest student.

“You’re practically asking for more repairs, you realize that?”

“The Stark boy suggested it first. _Insisted_ , even. He killed two birds with one stone, really.” Granted, Tyrion doesn’t need his telepathy to recognize that Robb Stark had no idea who his brother’s roommate was, but the boy seems mature for his age. He’s confident that it will all work out.

“You have that look on your face,” Bronn tells him. “The one that says you’re extremely confident that something’s going to work out.”

Tyrion ponders. “Doesn’t it always?”

“It’s the same look you had when you asked me to help you find your way out of a barfight.”

“My point stands. How is Theon, by the way?”

“Off sulking somewhere, but definitely still on school grounds.” Bronn whistles. “I haven’t seen him that desperate to leave since his first few months here. Did you miss your monthly pep talk with him or what?”

“I am so glad,” Tyrion says, turning another page of student records, “that I surround myself with people who take my work seriously.”

“Do _you_? Putting those three in the same—“

“Problems are rarely solved unless they are directly confronted. I would have thought you’d agree with it, what with your life philosophies.”

“You have a funny way of solving your problems, Lannister.”

“Diplomacy is key, Bronn,” Tyrion says very simply, “diplomacy is key.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> think of bronn as wolverine. just think about it.
> 
> thank you to everyone who's left comments and kudos!! realizing i'm not the only one trash for a mutant AU is so comforting, i could cry


	3. three.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Robb confronts Jon, Jon confronts Theon, and Theon confronts reality.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i feel vaguely terrible that these chapters lengths aren't consistent at all. so far they've just kept getting longer, but i feel the need to warn you all that they might not always be 6000 word monsters (cries)
> 
> i'm trying very hard to reply to every comment but if i miss you please know that i did read it and probably spent too much time appreciating it and forgot to reply ;-; thank you for all your support

This is how Robb finds out: on the ice, hockey stick in hand, feet tight in skates that have yet to feel natural again. It’s the first practice of the last hockey season in his high school career, and if his blood is rushing a little faster than usual, he attributes it to the adrenaline.

When he’s checked two, three, times into the board, hard enough to rattle his teeth, there’s almost no pain. He thinks he does feel _something_ , but it’s dull, faraway, shaken off by the time he readjusts himself and pushes off the wall. He attributes this dullness to the adrenaline too.

When an underclassman high-sticks and catches him in the side of the helmet, he feels no pain either. This he attributes to some form of shock.

Seconds later, he laughs it off when one of his teammates shouts, “You fucking Starks and your hard heads,” and claps his stick against the skates of the boy who’d hit him. “That’s a penalty in a real game,” Robb tells him, good-naturedly. The coach shouts something about watching themselves, but he’s already rejoining the fray with nothing but a faint buzzing in the side of his head, this one almost _pleasant_.

He’s up for a goal minutes later, only to be cut off by one of his teammates snatching the puck away from him. Robb follows, skates coming down on ice harsh and fast, eyes trained on the broad shoulders of his teammate and vision tunneling, tunneling—

In the impact, there’s a shout of pain that doesn’t come from him. He doesn’t feel any pain here, either, even when they barrel into the board, even when the board shatters, even when they keep barreling on to take out a bench. _Take out_ , in other words, _completely smash through three inches of solid wood._

He’s taken to the infirmary, though he doesn’t wake up to realize that until four hours later. By the time he does wake, his mother is standing over him, her features creased with worry and mouth forming words too fast.

A day later, she’s giving him a set of bags that smell of mint and leather and telling him, gently, to pack only what he thinks is necessary. 

 

‘

 

_It happened too fast_ , Robb thinks. Wandering the lofty halls of Tyrion Lannister’s mansion without any sense of direction, he corrects himself, _It’s_ still _happening too fast._

In truth, after Tyrion’s visit, he felt as if he could sleep another thirteen hours, but ironically enough, it was also restlessness that ultimately drove him out of the infirmary. _Up and about_ , Tyrion Lannister said, and so here he is now.

“Up and about,” he says to himself, squinting at the nearest potted plant and wondering if it’s the same one he passed ten minutes ago.

The mansion is bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside, and thinking about how much _power_ must be packed into this much _space_ makes Robb feel a little dizzy. 

He turns a corner and sees a girl disappear through the walls.

Things like that don’t help either.

He ends following a line of paintings down the hallway. The paintings depict different beaches but the similar-enough waves and shells and sandy shores, reminding him of a Theon who once drove him out to the beach for his fifteenth birthday. 

_This is the same Theon_ , he corrects himself, instinctively. 

He wonders where Theon is now, if he’s run off again, and hopes, faintly, that he hasn’t. And then he feels a little like the universe can hear his thoughts and is laughing at him.

He’s going to find Jon, he tells himself. He’s going to find his brother because he knows Jon wouldn’t run if Robb came to _him_ for answers.

As he walks by the first few open doors, he realizes that he must be in a wing of classrooms. He catches a glimpse of supply-and-demand graphs, a projection of a brain, and someone literally bending over backwards. Robb stops and stares at that last one, equal parts horrified and awed by the way the boy’s body folds neatly in half, as if trying to physically replicate a hairpin. He’s not sure what _that_ class is, but he keeps walking.

It isn’t long until he passes by a door, spots exactly who he was looking for, and stops again. “Jon,” he begins, completely forgetting himself as he steps in. It takes approximately two seconds for him to figure out that Jon is sitting in a _class—_ and by then, it’s too late. The surrounding students are staring at him, and the teacher, a brown-haired man in the middle of drawing something on the chalkboard, pauses.

“Hello,” the man says.

Robb wishes his genes could have given him something more useful like invisibility (so he can disappear) or flexibility (so he can shove his foot in his mouth) or the ability to crumple in on himself until he winked out of existence (so he can crumple in on himself until he winks out of existence). 

Unfortunately, he’s stuck with glowing hands and a decent ability to talk himself out of trouble. He looks apologetically at the teacher. “I’m sorry for interrupting, I… I’m lost.”

“Oh, you’re the latest addition, aren’t you?” The man looks pretty young, and the open grin on his face makes him look like he should be one of the students instead of the teacher. Robb’s used to stern eyes, ramrod-straight backs, formal tones. This one is waving him inside with one hand, his other hand poised over a half-finished drawing of a…squiggly oval? “I’m Renly, this is level two physics, and you are…?”

Saying his full name has always made him feel conscious of his family’s status. His encounter with Margaery makes him more hesitant, knowing that his father’s stances on mutants don’t sit well with everyone…but maybe the people here might sooner associate him with his siblings instead. That’s something he would feel more comfortable with. “I’m Robb Stark.”

There’s recognition in Renly’s eyes. “Ah, another one. And where are you supposed to be?”

“I don’t know.” He tries not to meet anyone else’s eyes, but _they’re_ all looking at him, so it’s a bit unavoidable. He glances down quickly to make sure his hands haven’t started glowing and that he hasn’t grown an extra limb or something. “I haven’t gotten a schedule for classes yet.”

“I see.” The man surveys the room, then nods to himself. “Well, you can sit in for the rest of the lesson, if you don’t have anywhere else to go. We’re missing a student, so you could fill in their seat.” He gestures. Robb spies an empty seat one row behind Jon.

Jon raises an eyebrow at him, wearing that expression of quiet amusement, the same one he’d worn when he passed his driver’s test before Robb. It’s vaguely challenging.

So Robb goes.

He feels less awkward five minutes later when he finds a pencil on the floor, thus making his hands look not-so-completely empty; everyone else is bowed over their notes, scribbling away. He looks down busily at his desk so he doesn’t stand out so much. 

It still feels like they’re watching him.

“So, let’s return to energy,” Renly says, slapping the board. “What do you all think I’ve drawn here? Please, I’m open to interpretations.”

Hands shoot up.

“Yes, Alex?”

“A potato?”

“No, this is a meteor.”

A few chuckles. Robb finds himself smiling a little too as Renly takes up a blue piece of chalk and scribbles a blue blob in the middle of the ‘meteor.’ “And what is this?”

More hands.

“Yes, Warren?”

“Water?”

“Yes, correct, thank you.”

Robb finds his eyes wandering as Renly goes on about meteors filled with water and how they hurtle through the atmosphere. His gaze eventually lands on his desk, where he realizes that someone has drawn little figures along the top, made to look like they’re dangling.

“…creates friction as this gargantuan rock rips through the atmosphere, and the law of conservation of energy allows that kinetic energy to be converted into heat energy, causing…”

Robb picks a particularly panicked-looking stick figure and draws a speech bubble by it: _Help me!_

He moves his arm and realizes there are more things at the bottom of the desk. There, little tentacles have been etched, as if reaching for the dangling stick figures at the top.

“…boil and boil and boil, and as we know that temperature has a direct relationship to pressure, the higher the temperature, the greater the pressure, until eventually…”

Robb’s seen these caricatures before, along the margins of the notebooks he’d leave vulnerable in his room whenever Theon came over—

“… _boom_!” 

Renly’s exclamation sends him jolting up straight in his seat. Luckily, others have the same reaction, and the sudden rattling of his seat doesn’t stick out so sorely. 

Renly is frantically scribbling over his drawing with red chalk. Like pressure to temperature, his excitement seems to be directly related to the sudden humidity in the room and the way the windows have fogged up with condensation. “I think you need to calm down, Renly,” someone calls out, and the room erupts into chuckles. Robb finds himself joining them at the slightly embarrassed look on the teacher’s face when he realizes what he’s done. He flicks a hand at the windows. The room lightens — _when did it get dark?_ — and the fog turns into fat droplets that race down the glass.

_So even teachers still lose track of their powers sometimes_ , Robb thinks, with some comfort. _Is he hydrokinetic too?_

The thought brings back other thoughts, not all of them wanted, and he’s glad that Renly dismisses the class a few minutes later.

“Figured that the first place you’d go to after being released from the infirmary is a classroom,” Jon comments when Robb steps up to join him. 

“I always liked physics,” Robb says with some trace of nostalgia.

“No, you always liked your good grades in physics. I remember during the week of your final, you spent so much time worrying about not getting sick that you ended up getting sick from the worrying.”

“Like you didn’t do the same when that girl asked you out on a date.”

Jon’s face colors as he gathers his papers. Robb grins triumphantly. 

“Are you still talking to her?”

“It’s complicated,” Jon mutters, not for the first time. “You know, the fact that I had that reaction to a girl while you had yours to a _test_ probably insults you more than me.”

Robb pretends to think it over. “Nah, I think I win this one.”

There’s an easy rebuttal Jon could make. _Like you didn’t make yourself sick that week after your sixteenth birthday_ , he could say. Robb is glad that Jon doesn’t.

“I guess I always _tolerated_ physics,” he accedes, by way of saying thank you.

Jon gives him a little grin, and that at least is one thing that feels normal.

Renly stops them on their way out. Robb worries for a second that he’s looking for a full discussion of what Robb thinks about the school, but Renly merely asks Jon as he tucks a few folders into his bag, “Hey, are we still good for next week?” He looks friendlier up close, perhaps slightly weary.

“Yeah, I’m good to act as your human Bunsen burner,” Jon says with a dryness that horrifies Robb. That, to a _teacher?_

But Renly, to Robb’s bafflement, only puts his hands up and grins. “You know how I feel about the budget cuts, man.”

“Uh huh,” Jon says.

Renly laughs unabashedly and slings his bag over his shoulder. “Text me, all right? We still have to figure out our next danger room session.” He glances over at Robb, and his smiles warms a little. “Hope you’ll officially join us next time.” He gives them a little salute, and then he’s leaving the classroom with the last of the students.

“What was _that_ ,” Robb says at the sight of his retreating back.

“That’s Renly. Baratheon— You remember dad’s friend? That’s his brother.”

Robb marvels at the coincidence. The world is beginning to seem smaller—or maybe it’s just _this_ world, this one full of people with weird genes. The school is one of a kind, after all, and he has read enough articles to know that the idea had been around for years, but Tyrion Lannister was the only one to actually successfully establish a school, probably because of his family name. _Mutants either go to Tyrion or join the wildlings_ , Robb has heard before. He knows little of the latter, only that they advocate for self-determination, a word that scares most into advocating for Lannister’s school instead.

“He looks young for a teacher,” Robb says.

“Yeah, the older students who stay here help out in one way or another. Most of them job shadow the teachers, so someday they could teach too.” Jon shrugs. “I heard Mr. Lannister’s planning to expand and take in more students, so he’ll need more teachers eventually.”

“You help out too?”

“Mostly with training sessions. I work with Renly on those. I don’t have enough experience to help teach.”

“I can’t imagine you teaching.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

“And next week, you said you’re going to…” He’s heard people refer to his half-brother as many things, but never _human Bunsen burner_.

“There’s a field trip I can’t go on next week, so I’m staying to help Renly run a lab demonstration instead.” Jon shrugs. “Don’t look so worried, I _have_ spent the past two years learning to control my powers.”

It's meant to be a jibe, Robb knows, but it's bittersweet.

This is how Jon found out about his powers: Robb was yanked from sleep at four AM by a text from his brother asking him to meet him outside. Robb brought Grey Wind with him because it was dark and he’d watched a horror movie just earlier that night, but the only person waiting for him on the sidewalk was Jon, clutching a bundle of singed cloth with shaking, equally singed hands. “You _can’t_ tell anyone,” Jon had said, eyes blown wide in terror like Robb had never seen before, and that was why Robb was the one who buried the burnt sleeping bag in the woods behind the house and made excuses for why Jon was staying so long in his room and sat with Jon whenever he drank water, terrified that his brother would dissipate into thin air or something as horrifying.

And when their father inevitably found out and the name _Tyrion Lannister’s School for the Gifted_ came up seriously for the first time, it had felt less like _Jon is going away_ to _we’re sending Jon away_.  It hadn’t felt like that later, when they were sending Bran and Arya and Sansa off. Robb still can’t figure out if that was because Jon was simply the first or because of the same reason his mother never really treated Jon the same or— Or—

Jon’s words bring back that guilt. So, in true fashion, Robb says, “I bet I can learn to control mine in less time.”

Jon doesn’t miss a beat: "You don't even know what _yours_ is." Not too long after, he says, “What are we betting for?”

Robb walks out of the classroom with him. The halls have become lively now that there are students milling around. “Winner gets the rights to take the NES when they move out,” he suggests.

“Then get ready to have to come over to my apartment whenever you want to play _Legend of Zelda_ ,” Jon huffs.

There’s an _I missed you_ and an _I missed you too_ somewhere in the exchange, implicit, the way those things always are.

Jon weaves easily through the students, and Robb doesn’t know where he’s going but he’s content to follow. “Jon,” he begins a few minutes later, after they pass the staircase and narrowly miss someone lined with porcupine quills. “About Theon…”

Jon stares straight ahead.

“You should have told me,” Robb says, thinking of band-aids being ripped off quickly.

“It never came up,” Jon says shortly. “You never asked.”

“Well, yeah.” Robb quickens his pace to fall into step next to him. “What was I supposed to do, somehow guess that you were pretty much living under the same room as him?”

“Sansa said you were doing better, so I thought you finally got over him. I wasn’t about to reverse that.”

He feels himself flush before he can help it. The way Jon says it makes it sound like he and Theon were—

“I figured it was useless to tell you,” Jon says.

“What the hell?” he blurts, some of the anger finally sparking. “He’s— He was my best friend, and you thought it was useless to tell me?”

“What else was I supposed to think, Robb?”

They’re in a mostly empty part of the mansion now. There are a few students around, but otherwise their only company is a hall of closed doors. Jon hasn’t stopped walking, though he’s lowered his voice.

“One day he goes off without telling anyone, and I get to watch you go from worried to sad to downright miserable for weeks, months. I get to watch you switch between acting like it was your fault and acting like you hate him, and the entire time, you refuse to tell me what happened in the first place. What _else_ was I supposed to assume, other than it ended _really_ fucking horribly and maybe I shouldn’t tell you he’s here because maybe you’ll fight again and he’ll leave again and I’ll have to see you go through hell again—“

“Well, that wasn’t your decision to make,” Robb argues. “You had no right to make it, and you know it.” He shakes his head. “You’ve always hated him, but this—“

“I don’t hate him,” Jon cuts him off as abruptly as he stops, the exasperation heavy in his voice. They’ve reached a door at the end of the hall, and he opens it with a long-suffering sighs. “I mean—yes, I did, gods, but… Look, when I came here, he tried to run too, and Tyrion had to personally stop him from actually getting away. When he came back, he told me he’d stay out of my way if I stayed out of his, and that included never talking about you. Inside, c’mon.”

Robb follows him in, only to spare the students outside. “And you agreed to that?” he asks, crossing his arms in disbelief.

“You were acting like you were trying to forget he ever existed, while he sounded like he didn’t want anything to do with you anymore,” Jon says helplessly. “If I knew you’d develop a mutation too, I might have warned you… But I didn’t.”

If those words sting coming from Jon, Robb can’t imagine hearing them straight from Theon. For that reason, he starts to appreciate Jon’s intentions, but… 

_No. I would have rather heard it than spent the last two years wondering._

Then: _If I never came here, would I have spent the rest of my_ life _wondering?_

“You should have told me,” he mutters.

Jon doesn’t say anything in response, and a terse silence falls over them instead.

Robb sighs quietly and takes the chance to look around the room. It doesn’t look like it’s been through multiple floods and fires (five and four, respectively, according to Jon’s messages), but he remembers Jon saying that they’ve been switched rooms before. He recognizes Jon’s side before his brother even goes to it; it’s definitely the cleaner, nearly threadbare side. There’s a _Direwolves_ pennant over the headboard, a shelf lined with leather-bound books, and a stereo on the bedside table. As minimal as it is, it makes Robb think of home.

Jon throws his books onto the bed. “Look, I was doing it for your sake,” he finally says.

Robb stops inthe center of the room, eyeing the other side: more haphazard, like Jon’s roommate left in a rush, open textbooks splayed on the rumpled bedsheets, the wall occupied by a single, large art print of a swelling tide. There is also, oddly, a giant blue bucket by one of the bedposts, half filled with water.

“Yeah. I know,” he responds after a short while. 

He understands, he does. He sees why Jon did it, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be angry about it. “I just wish…”

“Yeah, I know,” Jon echoes. He’s knelt by the drawer, rummaging for something and not meeting Robb’s eyes. “I’m sorry you found out, but I’m not sorry I did it.” He shrugs.

Robb isn’t surprised to hear that; stubbornness has always been something they’ve had in common. He would make Jon promise to tell him the next time it happened, but he doesn’t even want to think about history repeating itself, nor does he think Jon would agree.

Robb watches him search for something and feels that the topic is at rest, albeit uneasily. _For now_ , he thinks. He doesn’t know what else he wants to say, but it feels like there’s still _something_ left.

He simply stands for a few more minutes.

When the silence begins to feel thin, he figures he should say, “I told Tyrion I wouldn’t mind rooming with you.”

Jon’s head shoots up, almost hitting the top of the drawer. “You _what_?”

Robb raises an eyebrow at that reaction, unsure of whether to be amused or offended that Jon looks so aghast. “He said that there was an accident with someone else’s room, and they had to be moved into the room they were preparing for me. He would have stuck me with some people I didn’t know if I didn’t tell him I could stay with you.”

“Robb,” Jon says, looking pained. 

“Don’t look so pained,” Robb says.

“When did you tell him that? Why didn’t you _ask_ me first?” 

He could point out that Jon never asked if he wanted to know about Theon or not, but he stops himself. “I didn’t think it was a big deal. We shared a room for years, what’s a few more days?”

“No, that’s not it, I…” Jon closes his eyes, leans forward, and rests his forehead against the drawer. He breathes, mutters something to himself that sounds suspiciously like _gods please help me_. “Listen. There are other things I didn’t tell you.”

Robb frowns. “Like?”

Jon finally lifts his head and looks at him with a graver expression than usual. “Like my roommate.”

“I know about your roommate,” he says, puzzled. “You’ve told me about all the accidents he’s had and his moodiness and how he once dumped cold water on you to wake you up.” He pauses, then adds as a half-hearted, last-ditch attempt to convince Jon, “I can even sleep on the floor, if it comes to that. Just don’t make me room with strangers, Jon.” 

The door slams open.

Theon, looking worse for wear, freezes in the doorway. 

“Yeah, that,” Jon says. “Theon’s my roommate.”

Robb doesn’t think before taking a step forward.

“ _No_.” The bucket jerks, sliding in front of him in one sudden motion that sounds water spilling over the edge, and Robb’s shin bangs into it. “Snow, what the _fuck_ is he doing here?” Theon practically snarls, hand flying from the doorknob to clutch almost protectively at the straps of a backpack he has slung over his shoulder.

This is how their reunion goes, in Robb’s imagination: Theon shows up, Robb shouts at him for making him believe he was dead, Theon explains, and Robb forgives him.

This is how their reunion goes, in reality: Robb’s throat goes dry, and he doesn’t think he’ll even make it to the shouting part.

“Theon,” he manages with a great amount of effort.

“ _No_ ,” Theon repeats, sounding on the verge of hysteria this time, and Robb does hear him laugh as he slams the door shut again.

_This feels familiar_ , Robb thinks faintly.

“Seven hells,” Jon mutters. “Stay here.”

“But,” Robb begins. _You didn’t tell me he was your roommate_ too _, you—_

“No, Robb,” Jon snaps. “Stay. Here.” He pushes himself up to his feet, shoving his curls away from his face restlessly. “ _Idiots_ ,” Robb hears him seethe as he leaves the room with yet another loud slam of the door.

Someone pounds on the wall from next door. “Can you guys keep your drama down?” they complain.

Robb looks at the wall, that same feeling of surreality washing over him. He finds himself staring at the art print. _The Great Wave off Kanagawa_ , his memory finally supplies him.

He laughs too. Then, because Jon told him not to, he leaves the room.

 

‘

 

He runs into Bran (or, Bran runs into him, wheels-first), and his younger brother’s excitement to show him around and general willingness to talk about things that _aren’t_ Theon are a much-needed change. He’s with a girl who introduces herself as Meera and who doesn’t seem to want to discuss Theon either, so when Bran finally asks if Robb wants to go on a walk outside with them, Robb wholeheartedly agrees. 

The idea of staring at nothing but a bunch of trees for a few hours sounds very appealing after the day _he’s_ had.

 

‘

 

This is how he spent the last day of his last summer with Theon: In his backyard, lazily floating in the pool while Theon sprawled on the grass nearby.

“If you could have any other superpower, what would you have?” he remembers asking.

“I’d fly,” was Theon’s answer.

“Really? That’s boring.”

“You know what’s even more boring? Your boring, old, normal genes.”

He laughed. “Okay, fair.”

“My turn. If you were forced to sell stuff to the black market for a living, what would you sell?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“A stupid one, like yours was.”

Robb rolled his eyes and shifted onto his stomach. He sank underwater for a little while, then resurfaced and swam over to the side of the pool.

Theon wasn’t too far away; Robb could have reached out and touched him, if he wanted. His eyes were closed, and he had his hands tucked under his head in a makeshift pillow. _Peaceful_ , Robb would later remember thinking. “I’d sell art,” he decided, since that sounded safe. “Like, stolen original paintings. The _Mona Lisa_ , _Starry Night_.”

“Those are the most boring paintings you could have listed.”

“Oh, well, what other ones do _you_ know?”  
“Klimt’s _The Kiss_ ,” Theon replied without missing a beat. “Hokusai’s _Great Wave off Kanagawa_.”

Robb had been mildly surprised at the specificity of that answer. “I’ve never seen those before,” he admitted. “What do they look like?”

“Klimt’s has two people kissing,” Theon said bluntly. “And Hokusai’s has a big wave.”

The latter made sense. The former… Robb shook his head. Years of being friends, and some things about Theon still remained mysteries. “You should get in.”

“Mm. Don’t feel like it.”

“I thought you liked the feeling of water.”

Theon had hummed, still not opening his eyes. “I don’t have to be in the water to feel it,” he’d said, and Robb had looked down at his arms, the little droplets that clung to his hands, and wondered if Theon could feel those too. When the water in the pool rocked gently against his shoulders, his face had inexplicably grown warm.

“Suit yourself,” he’d said, and he had sunken under, as if believing that the cool water would chase away the flush in his cheeks.

 

‘

 

Theon doesn’t bother to knock on Loras’s door before going in. “I need to stay here for a few days,” he announces to the three people lounging on Loras’s bed. This is a normal sight: Margaery has her brother’s head in her lap and appears to be untangling leaves from his hair, and Renly is snoring softly, tucked into Loras’s side. They’ve got some sort of dynamic that Theon doesn’t quite understand but has nonetheless become used to.

Loras barely lifts his head from his sister’s hands to spare him a tired, annoyed look. “Is this because of Robb Stark?”

“Yes.” Theon nudges the door shut with a foot and drops his bag unceremoniously by Renly’s bed. This has worked before because Renly was always sharing a bed with Loras anyway.

“Why am I your go-to?” Loras grumbles. “Why don’t you ever ask Margaery?”

Margaery smiles at him.

“No.” Theon tries not to shudder for multiple reasons. “Listen, I’m going to talk to Tyrion about getting my room switched, and then I will never ask for your help again.”

In any other situation, he would have been too proud to ask for a room change. When Jon came and Tyrion decided to lump them together, Theon was convinced that the man did it to test his patience and resolved to stay just to spite Tyrion. 

He wonders if Tyrion suggested that Robb should room with them too, then feels genuine terror at the thought.

“Has anyone ever asked you how many calories you’ve burned by running away from your problems?” Loras asks.

“Ha ha,” Theon not-laughs. He lies down and buries himself under the covers and listens to the sounds of Loras and Margaery’s idle chatter.

“Seriously, man, it’s not healthy,” Loras tells him.

Theon proceeds to bury his head under a pillow too so he doesn’t have to listen to Loras, of all people, trying to lecture him.

He doesn’t know when he falls asleep.

 

‘

 

He _does_ know when he wakes up, some hours later. Jon makes sure of it by mercilessly yanking every single cover off of him. “You’re unbelievable.”

“You’re an asshole,” Theon shoots back, the roughness of his voice making him sound even more annoyed. Good. “I told you I don’t want him anywhere near me, and you bring him to our fucking room—“

“He followed me there! And we would have left a few minutes after you came in, and literally none of this would have had to happen if you didn’t overreact—“

“I’m not overreacting _,_ I’m _reacting_ to you breaking one of our _rules_ —“

“Overreacting.”

“Can you _shut up_.”

“No. And you’re not staying here either.” Jon actually grabs his ankle and pulls, and Theon vows to find out whether it was Loras, Renly, or Margaery who ratted him out. “Get up.”

Theon glares as viciously as he can. “I’m not sleeping in the same room as him.”

“Then don’t sleep,” Jon says impatiently. “Come to dinner. When was the last time you ate—before or after you ran off last night?”

“Piss off.”

“He’s asleep in the room, all right?” Theon’s glare must intensify, because Jon adds, “He’s using _my_ bed, gods, can you stop trying to murder me with your eyes? Just come downstairs and eat something.”

His stomach rumbles in agreement. He turns and stifles a groan into the mattress. “You’re supposed to be on his side. You _are_ on his side. So why the hell do you care?”

Jon grunts. “Because Mr. Lannister can’t do it all the time. Now get up.”

Theon goes, and thankfully Jon doesn’t follow him. When he stalks to his usual table and feels practically the whole dining hall staring at him, he’s not sure if it’s because they’ve all somehow heard of the drama or because he looks like he’s been dragged out of a tree (considering how Bronn found him last night, it isn’t too far from the truth). Either way, he tells himself, he doesn’t care. _He doesn’t care._

“I understand you’re pissed about something, but could you do it quietly? You’re about to spill my water,” Brienne says from her end of the table.

Theon exhales through gritted teeth and thinks of a gesture similar to covering his ears. Soon enough, he stops feeling every trace of water in the room, and Brienne’s glass stops rattling. He grudgingly acknowledges that it does help him feel better.

“Thanks,” says Brienne.

Theon stabs into his meatloaf.

 

‘

 

“He hates me, is why,” Robb mutters at the other side of the dining hall, sinking his fork into meatloaf and pushing it around the plate.

“Maybe he’s just mad because he hasn’t seen you all day?” Bran offers, clearly oblivious to everything that’s happened. “I don’t think he really hates you.”

Arya snorts. “Destroying your meatloaf isn’t going to solve anything,” she says, and she must be the reason why Robb finds that he suddenly can’t move his fork.

“Look at you,” he says to her, trying to change the subject, “using your powers to save the helpless meatloaf.”

“She once used her powers to fling three forks of spaghetti at Sansa,” Bran says, and Robb decides that Bran is his favorite sibling today.

Arya beams with pride, and Robb knows that if Sansa was here, the conversation would quickly derail into an argument. But he’ll take what he can get. “Bran, tell him what _you_ learned to do.”

Bran sits up a little straighter, looking proud. Robb is happy to push away other thoughts in favor of paying attention to his answer. “I call it dreamwalking,” Bran says, grinning.

“Dreamwalking?”

“Yeah! I found out a few weeks ago that I can see what other people are dreaming. It’s really weird, because I accidentally went into one of Sansa’s, and she was dreaming about just sitting with a bunch of flowers… Anyway, I’m still pretty new at it, but I’ve been practicing with Jojen — that’s Meera’s brother — so I’m getting better.”

For a moment, Robb _does_ stop thinking about other things, interest piqued by the logistics behind Bran’s new ability. 

His younger brother’s mutation had manifested around the same time as Arya’s, and back then, Bran was only able to look into people’s memories. He sees how tapping into other people’s dreams could be an extension of that original ability, but he can’t begin to fathom the _how_ behind it.

“Are you sure they’re not just really lucid dreams?” he settles on saying, quirking a grin.

“Nope.” Bran pops the ‘p’ pointedly. “That was how I saw the vision of you.”

“Right. That.” There’s another thing to be curious about. “You never told me—what was it?”

“Well, it wasn’t really my vision. That’s Jojen’s power—‘precognition’ is the fancy word for it. He can see bits of the future. Not complete visions, though Mr. Lannister says he could if he keeps practicing, but kind of like in _Final Destination_. Just little pieces, mostly. We were practicing the morning before you came, and he happened to have a vision in his sleep. I peeked, and I saw you and Theon.”

Robb slumps slightly. Since the subject seems completely unavoidable today, he figures he might as well ask, “What did you see?”

“There was just this bright flash,” Bran says. “Oh, and the _Star Wars_ logo.”

It’s Arya’s turn to snicker into her food. 

That’s how Jon and Sansa find them, Arya giggling into her spoon, Bran defending the usefulness of Jojen’s ability, and Robb staring at his plate like it may soon give him answers.

“What do you think of the food?” Sansa asks. He looks up at his other siblings in time to catch Jon glancing around like he’s looking for someone, a disappointed frown settled over his face.

“It’s edible,” he says neutrally as his sister slides into the chair beside him.

“But, Robb,” Bran says, waving a hand in front of his face to get his attention, “that’s why I think Theon doesn’t hate you. Why else would Jojen have a vision of you and him watching _Star Wars_ and taking a picture together?”

It’s ridiculous that, of all things, _that’s_ what Bran would assume from the two arbitrary clues. The mental image of it is even more ridiculous. _Theon’s never seen_ Star Wars, Robb almost says. _And he’s made it clear he doesn’t want to be anywhere near me, let alone the same picture._

He makes sure he’s shielding, so Sansa can’t tell why his gaze suddenly drops to his plate again.

Sansa looks thoroughly confused but only shakes her head. “…Jon, are you planning to eat standing up?”

Jon finally sits next to her. “What are we talking about?” 

Robb glances at him and, still feeling a prickle of resentment from that afternoon, doesn’t answer.

“ _Star Wars_ ,” Bran fills in.

Their voices become mostly background noise as Robb returns to pushing his meatloaf around.

_Well, the last thing I want to do with you is take a picture together,_ he thinks, petulant, as if Theon can hear him. _And I’m glad I decided to leave my_ Star Wars _DVDs at home._


	4. four.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Theon can't catch a break.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lots of creative liberties taken with cerebro's mechanics here, ahah. i hope the descriptions are clear enough, but if not, let me know and i'll try to make them clearer! i was sick when i edited this chapter (and still sick as i post it) so what seems clear to me now might be different to non-sick people, bleh.
> 
> side note, i was visualizing the mansion and my flu-addled brain thought, "tyrion would totally have giant T symbols instead of X symbols, since his last name isn't xavier." so then i just imagined the x-mansion looking pretty much the same except with the teen titans T symbol instead lmao. (i was sick ok i didn't realize it would be L for lannister instead)
> 
> as always thank you so much for reading and supporting aaaaaaaaa

Tyrion Lannister wakes up to the sound of someone physically and mentally pounding on the door. Specifically, he wakes up to the sound of doorframe rattling so hard he fears it’ll crack and loud, tumultuous thoughts of _worriedguiltTheonwherewherelastnightwhyrunguiltfaultmine—_

He groans and mentally reaches for the mind standing outside his door, that unique, beautiful, teeming mind, then imagines covering it up with a dome lid. He cares about his students, but he also cares about not having migraines at… He throws a glance at the clock. _Bloody six thirty in the morning._

The dome lid, then—nice and silver and smooth, soundproofing the student’s errant thoughts from his own mind. _Much better_.

“I’m getting there, all right!” he calls, barely managing to sound _not_ irritated. 

The pounding on the door stops, at least, though the pounding in his head is another monster of its own. Tyrion sighs as he forces himself from the comfort of his bed, slipping on the nearest bathrobe, and padding to the door. “Yes, Robb?” he says before the door even completely swings open, because he’s had the other Starks long enough to know that none of their minds would be as loud and jagged and tinged so much by Greyjoy colors as Robb Stark’s.

“Mr. La—“ Robb cuts himself off, flushing a little at the neck. “I mean, Tyrion.” He doesn't look like he's just been woken up rudely, because he wasn't.

“Yes, Robb?” Tyrion asks patiently. 

The Stark boy’s eyes visibly glaze over in thought, and he, astonishingly, says nothing else. Tyrion recognizes that look from Sansa Stark: it's a look that says he's mentally light-years away, playing out the rest of the conversation in his mind and getting carried away in doing so. 

Tyrion withholds a sigh and imagines lifting that dome lid, though the imagery automatically makes him think of food on a platter and he’s not sure how accurate it would be to compare a mind to food, least of all _this_ mind. 

Robb Stark’s mind reminds him of his sister’s dusty-gold hair knotted up in the morning, which makes for a curious first impression. Tyrion doesn’t delve any further into the boy's thoughts — he never does without anyone’s permission — though Robb Stark is thinking so loudly that Tyrion almost doesn’t have to. Skimming his surface thoughts reveals that t here are enough colors in there to comprise a rainbow. Tyrion recognizes a few—dusk blue for Jon Snow, shell pink for Sansa, flint gray for Arya, among nearly a dozen others that curl and tangle over the color of Robb Stark’s own mind, almost obscuring it completely. 

It’s no surprise that many of those mental strands of hair also bear Theon Greyjoy’s color (a smoky heather), that it’s intertwined with almost every single knot. _And there are a lot_ , Tyrion observes grimly, receding from the boy’s thoughts for now. It’s not that he can’t handle it — he’s seen trickier, including Theon Greyjoy’s — it’s simply too early to _attempt_ to handle it.

Besides, Robb Stark is shaping up to be incredibly transparent, as every mental nudge of inner conflict flickers openly across his face. The glimpse of his mind simply confirms what Tyrion was searching for.

“ _Yes_ , Robb?” he repeats, more patiently.

The boy (well, perhaps not really, but every student is a child to him) blinks, and out comes an overwhelmingly unsurprising answer. “Um, so I found out who Jon’s roommate was, and I feel awful for asking after I insisted on it yesterday, but I— I really don’t get along well with Theon,” _lie_ , “and I didn’t see him at all yesterday,” _lie_ , “including last night, and I’m worried that that was related to me being in his room,” _truth?_ , “and I don’t want to accidentally drive him out of his own room, so I thought it might just be best if I stayed somewhere else, if that’s okay?”

Typical. No one respects his dorm assignments (those Reed siblings have practically traded their respective roommates to room with each other, Margaery Tyrell more or less has three rooms to call her own, and he’s had to send Bronn out in the middle of the night to retrieve Arya Stark from that blasted treehouse several times). He doesn’t actually particularly care, but it’s just—the _thing_ of it.

_At least this one’s being polite about it_ , he thinks, rubbing his forehead wearily. He understands that this affair traces back to long before he first found Theon Greyjoy with a bag of crude suppression pills, but he’s certain that its lifespan and severity don’t justify _running away from it_. Though maybe Bronn had a point about forcing the two to stay in the same room… An idea strikes him.

He says, “If that’s what you think is best,” and watches Robb Stark’s face loosen with relief. “I trust you’ve made your own arrangements?”

“Yes,” Robb says, almost too automatically for Tyrion to believe him.

“Good.” He pauses, considering. “If that’s everything, I’d like to go back to sleep now.”

“Oh. Right. Sorry.”

“It’s part of the job,” Tyrion says, honestly. _Though I’ve played counselor more times than I expected to._ “But since you’re here—“ _And since I’m rather removed from sleep anyway_. “I can tell you that you’ll get your schedule later today. How do you feel about performing an ability check, as well?”

“A what?”

“An ability check. We’ll put you through a simulation to try to pinpoint the extent of your powers.”

“Oh.” Robb’s gaze flickers downwards, and Tyrion notices that he’s looking at his hands again. “Yeah, I should probably do that. When…?”

“I’ll send Bronn to get you when it’s time. Don’t worry about it.”

“All right.” Robb looks dubious of his last piece of advice but nods nonetheless. “Thank you. Sorry again for waking you.”

Tyrion manages a smile. “There won’t be a need to apologize once I’m asleep again,” he says, not unkindly.

Robb nods again quickly and steps back to allow Tyrion to close the door, and when Tyrion does, he hears Robb’s mental and physical exhale of relief. 

_That boy is going to develop worry lines faster than me._

 

‘

 

Theon wakes up normally for the first time in what feels like weeks, though when he blinks and the room comes into focus — specifically, Renly and Loras draped over each other on the opposite bed — he remembers the physics pre-lab he’s been putting off and realizes it’s actually only been two days.

He rolls over, then hisses when his eyes are promptly attacked by sunlight; he forgets that Renly puts his bed right by the window so he can be close to the potted plants he keeps on the sill. Theon glares at the things, but he lifts water from the nearby jug anyway and sends it seeping into soil and root. This is how he repays Renly for convincing Loras to occasionally harbor him: He helps keep his damn plants alive.

He still wonders if Renly keeps them because they remind him of Loras, or something. The thought makes him blanch. _Renly and Loras_ usually make him blanch, the moon-eyes they make at each other, how in love, love, love they are even though Loras could theoretically entomb Renly in a tree trunk and Renly could theoretically send a lightning strike through Loras. _Theoretical, in theory, theoretically speaking_ —all different ways to say that these things ultimately have the same chance of occurring as any other. (And why, he thinks, probability is fucking _useless_.)

_You’re always thinking of the worst, aren’t you_ , he hears Asha say, imagines her rolling her eyes at him, and he pushes the thought away. Too early. Actually, he decides as he sits up, for any thought of his family, it’s always too early.

The covers drag low but his shirt has ridden high. He yanks it back down quickly, then shoots a stricken look across the room in case either of the lovebirds saw—but Renly and Loras are still fast asleep, and the jagged scar across his midsection remains his secret.

Roughly fifteen minutes later, he’s dressed and leaving. The silent halls and mostly-closed doors mean that he’s early, a good sign if he wants the kitchen to himself—and he does. It feels like it’s been weeks since he’s had a normal meal too.

The mansion’s kitchen is almost hilariously small for its sprawling dining hall, but Theon knows that that same hilariously small space has been used to cook enough food to feed a hundred-something students, so he’s formed some sort of appreciation for it. Typically the cooks make three main meals (and a running joke says that Bronn is the head chef), though once in a while some student will feel generous (or experimental) enough to prepare a meal for the entire school.

Theon’s never done such a thing before. He doesn't set a precedent today either. Fifteen more minutes later, he’s planting himself on one of the stools with a plate of newly-microwaved toaster strudels.

There are three conversations he has to have today—he has to find that notebook Ygritte scrawled her number on, he has to tell Tyrion about his decision, and… Actually, he can’t decide if the third should be with Loras or with Jon, because he’d honestly rather eat a rock than _begin_ to try to tell either of them “thank you” for putting up with his shit over the years, but he figures if he talks to Loras, he can put in some kind of good word for Jon with Ygritte and thank him that way. Minimal face-to-face, real-life interaction, just the way he likes it.

It's beginning to look like a plan. He likes that too.

Then he finishes his food just as Robb Stark walks into the kitchen, and. 

Honestly, nothing is _fair,_ nothing works, nothing comes out in his favor even though he’s been trying so fucking _hard_. He freezes as if staying absolutely still might camouflage him from sight, but that’s not his mutation, and Robb’s always been a little oblivious but not oblivious enough to miss Theon right there at the counter with fingers still sticky from the toaster strudels.

Eye contact is unavoidable, because this time they’re alone and there’s no one else in the kitchen to cushion the situation. Robb’s eyes are wide and blue, blue and blue, blue the way they are in Theon’s dreams when he is holding Robb underwater—

Robb fidgets. He looks like he’s about to say something, so Theon tears off a paper towel piece from the counter and begins wiping down his hands. They’re shaking.

He goes for the refrigerator at the same time Robb steps towards it, and they both freeze. Theon glowers — an instinct — and Robb looks away first, whirling around to the sink where he pretends to wash his hands. It’s a problem, though, because after Theon puts away the box of toaster strudels, he realizes needs to wash his hands and Robb is still there wasting water (he turns off his senses because he can _feel his hands_ , warm and soft and familiar under the spray). He steps towards the paper towel rolls instead, but then the sink is shutting off and Robb is turning and reaching for the towels too, and there’s another moment in which they freeze and flinch away from each other and Theon’s getting _sicker_ by the moment, he swears. He turns to the doorway and begins to walk but apparently Robb also thought of the same thing, because they mirror each other over the counter again, and what in seven hells is this.

Theon finally slams his hand down. “Stop _following_ me,” he hisses, feeling a culmination of the past days’ tension seeping into his voice. It’s the voice he used when his brothers used to pick on him. He’s never used it on Robb before.

Robb looks like a deer caught in headlights. When he stammers, "I'm  _not_ ," he sounds hurt, and Theon feels like shit.

“Yes you are,” Theon snaps, because why else would Robb be everywhere he looks, why else would he be in the very place that Theon came for the sole purpose of getting away from him? He bites the bullet and pushes on, “It was cute when we were younger, but now you need to take a fucking hint, okay?” Harsher still, he throws, “I don’t want you near me.”

He doesn’t look at Robb’s face, knows he’ll take everything back if he does, and just tosses the wadded paper towel at the open trash bin and watches the shot miss miserably. 

Robb doesn’t try to stop him when he goes, and he’s not sure how he feels about it.

_Be glad for it_ , says his voice of reason, _now get out of there, go go go—_

He almost runs into Arya on his way out of the kitchen, and he curses as he almost shoves himself into the doorway to avoid her. _They’re everywhere,_ he thinks fleetingly, but at least Robb being in the kitchen means that he is _not_ in Theon’s room—unless his mutation lets him duplicate himself or teleport instantaneously, and Theon is fairly sure that he can’t do either. (He doesn’t think about what a nightmare it would be to avoid Robb Stark _then_.)

When he arrives at his room, Jon is an unimpressive lump of black clothes and hair on his bed. Theon’s own bed looks untouched, so it would seem that Jon and Robb shared Jon’s bed the previous night — _too bad Snow wasn’t kicked out to the floor_ , Theon thinks snidely, then feels guilty, then makes himself stop feeling guilty. (That leaves room for the other kind of guilt, the one that makes him want to find Robb and tell him he’s _sorry so sorry didn’t mean it_ and— do something stupid like they’re under the bleachers again and—)

Theon ignores him and proceeds to pull out the backpack he keeps under his bed and shoving in as many clothes as he can. Jon wakes just as Theon is zipping the bag up.

“Robb?” Jon asks, groggy, and Theon’s eyes flit over to the doorway nervously. The door is still closed. “Theon,” Jon corrects himself, and Theon sees that he’s sat up now, dragging a hand roughly down his face. “You’re an idiot.”

“Where’s my copy of _Catch-22?”_

“I burned it months ago.”

Theon sees red. _“Why?”_

“Because you threw my _Great Expectations_ in the river.”

“ _Fuck_ Dickens. Fuck you too.”

Well, now that he’s said that, he realizes he can’t nicely ask for Ygritte’s number anymore. Then he remembers— 

He slides across the carpet on his knees (he winces) to Jon’s bottom drawer and yanks it open. He ignores the startled and offended noise that Jon makes in favor of searching for a familiar faded gray t-shirt emblazoned with _Star Wars_ , the one that Jon was wearing when they met Ygritte and she scrawled her phone number along the neckline, thus guaranteeing that Jon never ever wore it in public again—

“Thank the drowned god,” Theon says solemnly when he finally finds the thing. It looks just as sad and ratty as he remembers, but complete with Ygritte’s digits still inked on the fabric. “I’ll give this back to you later. Bye.”

He’s up and out of their room (soon-to-be Jon and Robb’s room, he supposes) before Jon can stop him.

Using his own phone is out of the question, so he finds a quiet, empty room with one of the mansion’s many phones and picks up the receiver. “ _—then what would you do?”_ he catches someone purr, and of _course_ the landline is already being used. Theon doesn’t have time for this.

“You have three seconds to hang up before I tell Tyrion you’re using the landline to have phone sex,” he snarls.

“What the fuck, man,” he hears one of them cry before he slams the receiver down. 

When he picks it back up, the line is clear. He dials Ygritte’s number.

She picks up on the third ring. “Jon Snow,” she drawls, and Theon, fresh from the conversation he’d just butted into, shudders at the thought of Jon and Ygritte doing anything remotely similar. Why else would she assume it’s Jon if Theon’s calling her from the landline, not Jon’s phone? 

“No,” he says curtly. “This is Theon.”

“Oh,” she says, sounding unfazed. “What can I do for you, Theon Greyjoy?” She has this habit of using everyone’s full names, and Theon thinks it’s exactly for the purpose of unsettling people, so he makes it a point not to feel unsettled at the reminder of his family name.

“That offer you made me. It still stands?"

In the pause, he imagines her raising her eyebrow. “You’ve reconsidered?”

“Yeah. And I want to. It’s just…getting a ride would be a problem.” Bronn might finally, actually kill him if he took one of Tyrion’s cars that far north.

“It’s not a problem at all,” Ygritte says smoothly. “I was planning on dropping by in a few weeks, anyway. I'll bring you back with me then.” He can hear the grin in her voice, probably at the prospect of seeing Jon Snow, vexing Tyrion Lannister, or both. Probably both. “Could you wait that long?”

The mention of _a few weeks_ makes his stomach drop a little. It’s not a question of whether he can wait (oh, he’ll wait, he’s waited and waited for other things for years), it’s a question of whether by the time Ygritte arrives, he’ll still _want_ to go.

_You’re assuming Robb wants you to stay_ , says his voice of reason.

_He’s always wanted me to stay_ , he thinks, which he knows is stupid and selfish.

_That’s stupid and selfish_ , says his voice of reason.

“What,” he says, trying to stall and trying to sound casual, like this isn’t a significant last resort for him, “you’re not going to ask why?”

“You _want_ me to?”

“Good point.”

“I know. Now, your answer?”

He looks down and finds that he’s absently began playing with the cord of the phone. _Tyrion’s got a mansion and he_ still _doesn’t have cordless phones,_ he thinks on a whim. “Can I think about it?” This is what he means: _Can I see if there might be a way to hitch a ride faster?_

“I guess so.” Ygritte sounds noncommittal. “Might have appreciated you thinking about it _before_ you decided to wake me up.”

“It’s, like, seven in the morning,” he points out.

“Where _you_ are.” Some shuffling. “It’s barely light here. Timezones do exist, Greyjoy, and you and your little school aren’t the center of the universe.”

He hears one more laugh before Ygritte hangs up. For some reason, he thinks of calling her again to defend himself, but he feels like that would only prove her right or something, so he doesn’t and puts the phone down and stuffs the shirt into his bag.

With the call ended, he’s left standing in a quiet and empty classroom, which reminds him that he has a class later. _I wonder what classes he has_ , he finds himself thinking, inevitably leading to, _what if I have a class with him?_

_I’ll just have that talk with Tyrion first._

 

‘

 

“No,” says Bronn, insufferable as he is. Since he’s standing in front of Tyrion’s office and preventing Theon from going inside, he’s even moreso.

Theon balks. “Why?”

“He’s on the phone with his brother.”

Theon knows much of the Lannisters in public—their presence in the media, their thinly veiled distaste for mutants and simultaneous interest in the expanding market for the mutant population. Scumbags, in other words, willing to spit on mutants until they can make profit off of them. He knows little of the Lannisters personally, other than the few stories of Tywin Lannister that Tyrion would impart upon him as a basis for one of their _talks_. (Bronn calls them pep talks; Tyrion calls them lessons; Theon calls them unnecessary.) It’s well-known that Tyrion is the only mutant from his family, a detail that either makes for a stunningly successful or horribly disastrous sales pitch to a prospective student, and it's also well-known that he doesn’t get along with the rest of his family. There’s monthly drama that usually consists of rumors that Jaime Lannister is either trying to shut down the school or secretly funding it behind their father’s back.

Theon stares warily at the closed door and wonders which one it is this time.

“Yeah, so,” Bronn says, taking his lack of answer for compliance, “if you want to run away again, you should do it now so I can bring you back before he gets off the phone and finds out.”

“I thought you were ‘fed up with my drama,’” Theon quotes him by pitching his voice an octave higher. There are more students awake now, and a few of them giggle at him as they pass. He feels like snapping at them, a more extreme reaction than usual— He’s just been on edge lately, is all.

“I _am_ fed up with your drama, but I could use a few more cigarettes,” Bronn says with equally mocking thoughtfulness.

(That’s how Theon thanks him, buys him cigarettes on their way back from whatever motel he’d made it to that time, because he hates owing anyone anything.)

He groans. “All right, fine. Can you just tell him I need to talk to him after he’s done doing—whatever?”

Bronn looks vaguely disapproving of this. “I’m not his messenger owl.”

“You’re his secretary,” Theon goads as he begins stepping away, “it’s practically the same thing.”

“Go back to your dirt drawings and sulking.”

“It’s called _charcoal_ , you—“

Bronn’s laughter drowns out the creative name that Theon calls him, and Theon rolls his eyes as he turns and leaves for the elevator.

He doesn't want to risk going to class, so he goes to the danger room instead.

The danger room spans most of the sublevel. It’s divided into three smaller rooms to allow multiple training sessions to run at once, but whenever the dividers come down, the combined space spans nearly the same acreage as the mansion. Anyone can access the sublevel, and there are even monitors that students can use to watch ongoing sessions, but access codes to the doors and the programs themselves are limited to those who help lead training sessions.

Theon earned the right about half a year ago, during one of Tyrion’s "field trips" to Braavos that resulted in Theon and two nine-year-old students getting left behind during one of their stopovers. It took almost an entire day for Tyrion himself to come back and fetch them, and Tyrion had been impressed by “how well Theon handled himself and two younger students.” Theon thought that was kind of nice, someone being proud of him, so he didn’t tell Tyrion that he just convinced one of the nine-year-olds to use their invisibility to hide them in a gift shop after closing hours, and they proceeded to sleep using balled-up _I Heart Braavos_  hoodies as pillows.

When Tyrion proposed that he helped run training sessions, Renly was also just starting out, and so they were paired to collaborate on sessions together. Falling into a routine was simple enough: Renly planned out the simulation, while Theon did most of the real-time supervising.

He’s not sure why the hell Tyrion trusts him so much, but that feels nice too, to be trusted, and he hasn't messed up a single time. _Unless the last session counts as messing up._  It shouldn’t, right? No one technically got hurt.

_They could have._ He grits his teeth. _It’s all just simulated._

He steps out of the elevator, makes his way to the circular set of doors farthest down the hall. As he passes the other two, he notes that they're all empty. It doesn’t matter since the dividers are up, but he likes knowing he’s the only one on the floor.

There’s a screen by each of the three doors that controls the programming. Theon punches in his access code for the third room, and an array of his recently-run programs pops up to greet him. There are presets (all blandly titled to sound like low-budget video games— _Sentinel Fighting Simulator_ , _Speed Test Simulator_ , and _Wilderness Survival Simulator_ , for example), as well as other programs that have been customized and saved by other instructors.  Theon thumbs past all of them to find his own program, modestly titled _test 2._ He sets the timer for a few hours and hits the start button.

Technically, students change into uniforms for danger room sessions, but Theon isn’t planning on fighting anything today. The door exhales open, and Theon leaves his bag by the door and walks into the darkness. 

He doesn’t know the mechanics behind the danger room, though he’s interested in knowing someday. The student who built it was supposedly some kind of genius, and Theon thinks it’s an apt label, since he doesn’t know of any other technology that can do what the danger rooms can.  This is how it goes: You step in, and the room sends out sensory altering waves that communicate with the brain waves in your mind and tells you you’re seeing and feeling and experiencing something else. The room turns into a jungle, or an urban city or a desert or whatever the program has been coded to project, and every sensation becomes something you can physically feel.

For Theon, the room transforms before he even hears the door closing behind him, though of course, by the time he turns around, the door is gone and he’s greeted by a familiar treeline and sand, sand, sand. 

He sighs—or just breathes, really, takes in the artificial breeze and artificial sunlight and artificial sense of calm. If his childhood home was never really his home and he left Robb before the Starks could completely become a new one, maybe this is it, his real home. _Made of fake sand and fake crabs_ , he thinks, but he’s kicking off his shoes to properly feel it all. He feels calm here, feels quiet and alone, not in the usual bad way. He's on a beach, he likes to imagine, somewhere on the coast of Dorne or by the Summer Sea.

He leaves his shoes to find a spot close to the undulating sea. There, he sits and lets the water lick at his toes and continues to breathe.

Time flies.

 

‘

 

Time crawls.

Robb’s never been good at being idle; it always feels like he’s wasting time when he can be doing something else. He can’t remember having this problem before, when they were still in Winterfell and there was always some meeting or appointment or practice to attend. The busy-ness, it seems, is something he took for granted.

His siblings seem to have disappeared overnight — he barely sees Arya in the kitchen before she finishes grabbing an armful of food and rushing out the door with some mention of sword practice, he only catches a glimpse of Bran in the halls looking preoccupied with two other students, he hasn’t seen Jon since he woke up, and he hasn’t seen Sansa since the night before. It’s odd, being with them again but not _really_ being with them again. He tries not to miss the way things were before, because from what he’s seen so far, they look happy here. They have classes, they have _friends_. It just…feels strange, to feel like they’ve somehow moved on, without him. 

He’s grateful when, hours later, Tyrion finally seeks him out. He’s been sitting in the library and half-heartedly leafing through scientific journals so long that the corners of the pages are beginning to wrinkle from the amount of times he’s pinched them.

Tyrion looks genuinely surprised when he sees what he’s reading. “I’m glad to see those aren’t just collecting dust after all,” he says pleasantly.

Robb closes the booklets up, although he’s pretty sure that he’ll be seeing mutated genetic structures behind his eyelids for a while. “I’ve never been able to find articles this in-depth before,” he admits.

“I didn’t take you for the scholarly type.”

He's heard that before. He always had good enough grades, and when he was old enough to understand that he and his best friend were capital-d different, it was only common sense that he tried to understand the _how_ of it. 

_I don’t want you near me._

He wishes that the key to understanding Theon now could be found in a scientific journal too.

In the end, he settles for a shrug. “I guess.”

Tyrion looks at him like he’s trying to search his face for a deeper answer, but Robb doesn’t think he’ll find anything there. Finally, Tyrion says, “Are you ready for that ability check?”

“Now?”

“Yes.” Tyrion Lannister smiles the smile of a man who grudgingly knows much patience. Robb thinks he can empathize. “Follow me.”

They end up walking towards the same elevator that he saw Jon emerge from on the night he first arrived. He lets Tyrion press the buttons and leans against the elevator walls as the doors close. He sees, briefly, the new chandelier hanging before the doors close completely, and finds himself asking, “So Jon really set the chandelier on fire?”

Tyrion’s grinning a little. “Yes. That was a rather emotional night.”

Robb can only nod in agreement. “He does that often, then?”

“Now and then. His control has improved greatly since he came, but powers that physically manifest tend to be sensitive to mood changes.”

Robb considers that. Theon used to unconsciously shatter vases whenever he was frustrated.

_I don’t want you near me._

“What about powers that aren’t physical?” he asks. “Like, yours and Bran’s?”

Tyrion takes a second to answer. “They’re easier to isolate from emotions, I suppose, but ‘easy’ is likely the wrong word to use when describing any mutation. There’s always some sort of catch.” The elevator bell rings, and the doors slide open, revealing a long hallway lit up by fluorescent lights. They cast a blue glow over the area, a polar opposite of the warm lights of the mansion. It’s pretty bare too, aside from a single door to the right of the elevator and three large, closed double doors spaced out evenly along the left wall. A few monitors protrude from the walls, but other than that, there are no decorations — yet another difference from the mansion. “Your brother, Bran, for example, can’t really help whose dreams he wanders into at night. He tells me that when he has a nightmare, his mind ‘runs away’ from his own dreams, in a sense, and he ends up in another person’s. Emotion still affects his ability, just in a different way.”

Robb nods slowly. “So, with Bran’s,” he says, unsure of how to phrase himself for a moment, “or…with every mutation, really… Are you aware of it all the time?”

“Am I aware that the world views me as a genetic freak all the time?”

Robb feels the ground under him drop away. “Oh, no, I meant— I didn’t—“

“I was joking again.” Tyrion gives a short-lived laugh. “Sorry— Oh, bugger, that _was_ unnecessary. Sorry.”

“It’s okay?” Robb says uncertainly, wondering when it switched from him apologizing to Tyrion apologizing, but he doesn't get enough time to think it over. Tyrion is walking out of the elevator with as much ease as he walked before, and Robb can only shake off the remnants of his panic and follow him.

“To answer your question, yes, I am aware of everyone’s thoughts at all times. Your sister Arya has told me that she always feels every scrap of metal within a certain vicinity as well. My, ah, assistant Bronn is always aware of his claws, even when they’re not out.”

Robb bites his lip, imagining hearing voices all the time. “Is it tiring?”

“Mutants develop their powers at a very young age. They, including me, don’t remember a time when we _weren’t_ aware of our powers, and it usually takes active effort _not_ to be aware. Is it tiring? Sometimes. But we've all gotten used to it.” Tyrion pauses, then shakes his head, looking amused as he corrects himself. “ _Most_  mutants develop their powers young, anyway, save for a few…including you Starks, it seems. You’re eighteen, aren’t you?”

“Not officially until tomorrow,” Robb says.

“I mean this with the least offense possible—but you and your siblings are probably statistical nightmares.”

Sounds fair.

Tyrion stops them by a screen embedded into the wall and starts tapping things into it. He goes too fast for Robb to make sense of what he’s doing, so he lets his gaze wander around the rest of the hallway. There’s something leaning against the wall further down, some small black object, but he can’t tell what it is.

“It seems that someone else is using one of the other training rooms.” Tyrion has noticed the same thing. “It won’t jeopardize your session, though, no worries." He goes back to tapping away at the screen. "You should suit up while I get your session loaded up.”

“Er…" Robb automatically thinks of the last dinner he attended with his father, a black tie event that he spent two hours getting ready for. It's probably not what Tyrion means. "Suit up?”

“You know how to put on clothes, right?”

What kind of question is that? “Yeah…?”

“You see the door by the elevator? It leads to a changing room. You'll find training suits in there, and you're going to put one on as a standard safety precaution."

“Oh, like lab coats,” Robb says, beginning to understand.

Tyrion spares him another amused glance. “Yes, Stark, like lab coats.”

 

‘

 

The training suits are black and yellow and warp to his limbs, absolutely nothing like lab coats. They remind him more of the underclothes he wears as part of his hockey uniform, except there’s no jersey to hide him, just…clingy, though surprisingly stretchy material. He feels a bit exposed.

“Did I put this on right?” he asks, conscious, when he returns to Tyrion, who isn’t alone anymore. Bronn has apparently joined them in the time it took for Robb to change, and he seems to be saying something to Tyrion until Robb walks up to them bgain.

“Yes. Gold star.” Tyrion presses a green button on the screen, and the big, silver doors slide open, only to reveal an inky darkness.

Robb swallows. “I go in there?” He looks from Tyrion to Bronn, who is leaning against the wall, silent but clearly mirthful.

Tyrion claps. “Another gold star!” More seriously, he adds, “What you’ll be entering is a simulation. It’s something I programmed myself, and we’ve used it to determine students’ abilities before.”

“So I’ll stand there and get scanned, or something?”

“Not exactly. That _would_ be the simpler way, but I like teaching people things.” Tyrion’s smiling again. “The simulation is something more active. It will put you through a series of events designed to elicit a fight-or-flight response, which is a surefire way to trigger a reaction from your mutation."

“It’s always worked,” Bronn finally puts in.

“A hundred percent success rate,” Tyrion agrees.

Robb looks into the gaping doorway again. “Weren’t you saying something about me being a statistical nightmare…”  The little screen on the side is displaying the words _READY TO BEGIN_ , and there’s a bar at the top with the label _test 2.exe — EDIT MODE._ This gives him some assurance, because if Tyrion can edit the program, can't he fix it if anything goes wrong? “You’ll be out here the entire time, right?” he asks. It strikes him as something childish to say, but he can't help his apprehension. “You can stop it if something goes bad?” _Because I think the last time I used my mutation was when I was being slammed into the wall, and I don't know how well I'll handle something trying to slam me into the wall again?_

“Of course, Robb.”

_You’re overthinking. He runs a school full of kids, most of which are younger than you, and nothing’s ever happened to them. He’s trying to help._

“Okay,” Robb says.

He steps in.

 

‘

 

“Why _didn’t_ you just scan him?” Bronn asks with a lazy lift of his eyebrow, seconds after the doors shut and the telltale whirring of the danger room begins.

“Because I like teaching people things,” Tyrion repeats.

“When I said you shouldn’t just lock them in the same room together, I didn’t mean for you to lock them in a _bigger_ room together. Are you even running the real ability testing program?”

“I’m running whatever Theon was running, with a few modifications.” Tyrion waves him off. “It _will_ bring out the Stark boy’s ability, we’ll just have the added satisfaction of knowing that we have mended a broken relationship afterwards."

Bronn flicks through the screen with some interest. “You programmed a volcano in.”

“I did program a volcano in.”

He whistles lowly. “You already know what his mutation is, don’t you?”

Tyrion smiles, slow and sly. “Of _course._ I’m a telepath with a stellar IQ and Ph.D in genetics.” _And humble, clearly_. “Now, let’s raise the dividers and watch.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i really tried not to end this one with a cliffhanger, but it was either stop here or let the chapter grow into a 9k monster and i need soME consistency, ok. (weeps) next up, some catharsis finally!!!


	5. five.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It apparently takes a life-threatening situation for Theon to realize some things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO THIS ONE'S A LITTLE LATE, i apologize, but my work schedule changed and i didn't have as much time to write. BUT this one's also around 8k words long so i hope that's some sort of redeeming quality :>
> 
> i found out i don't like writing action scenes much, i feel like they clash with my apparently inherently flowery writing style but i triED ok. 
> 
> i couldn't reply to as many comments for the last chapter but pls know i read and cherish every single one of them. bless you all for your support and patience!!!!!

This is how history goes: It was their last summer together, and Theon was lying on the grass and Robb was coming over to the side of the pool and telling him to get in.

“Don’t feel like it,” Theon told him.

He could picture Robb’s eyebrows knitting downwards in simple confusion when Robb said, “I thought you liked being in water.”

“I don’t have to be in water to feel it,” Theon explained, because they were in that position frequently, Robb floating in water while Theon sat nearby, watching Robb’s head come dangerously close to knocking against the side of the pool and wordlessly shifting the waves so they carried Robb the other way. (The things he did for love— The things he _does_ for love.) Theon imagined Robb would go soft-eyed if he told him he did that, the way Sansa did whenever she watched her fictive kings and queens swear to protect each other. Or maybe that was wishful thinking and Robb would frown and tell him he can take care of himself instead. Neither thought made the prospect of telling Robb any more appealing, so Theon simply never did.

“Would you take me to the beach one day?” Robb spoke up again, seconds later. He coughed a few times, and Theon guessed he had held his breath too long underwater. For all his straight A’s, Robb did stupid things sometimes, Theon thought. “Like, a real beach?”

“No,” Theon said, “I’ll take you to a fake beach, with fake sand and fake water—“

Robb’s laughter cut him off. “Shut up.” Theon felt droplets smatter on his arm, and he finally opened his eyes and looked over to see Robb hanging over the side of the pool, arms propped innocently over the edge as he held himself up. “You know what I mean.”

Robb’s hair had a tendency to turn a darker shade of auburn when it was wet, he noticed. His dampened curls clung to his temples and the sides of his neck, and Theon knew if he concentrated he could feel Robb’s skin, which was why he didn’t. 

Winterfell was cold and landlocked, two things that irritated Theon and two reasons that his father had moved them there, and any beaches within the same latitude was probably too cold for swimming. They would have to go south first — not far, just far enough to escape the gray, wintry clouds that seemed to perpetually hang over Winterfell — and Theon didn’t have a car, and while Robb _did_ have a car, he had no license. All of it should have added up to a simple answer: _No, it’s too much work_.

Robb was looking at him with those eyes, not quite the big puppy eyes he flashed at his parents, but just the quiet, earnest gaze he occasionally turned on Theon (and occasionally Theon liked to think it was admiration he saw in it, but that couldn’t be, what could Robb Stark admire _him_ for?). That look meant that Theon instead answered, “Yeah, sure, we’ll go to celebrate when I graduate from hell.”

Robb’s nose scrunched up, and Theon turned back to look at the sky where it was safer. “It’s just school,” he said, as Theon expected him to. “You might even miss it.”

“I more-than-might _not_.” _Definitely will not_ , his mind supplied.

“Well, _I’ll_ miss you, even if all you did during homeroom was stream pointless videos to slow down the school wifi…”

_I’ll miss you_ , he thought. The words affected Theon more than he wanted to admit. He thought that it was probably a good time to remind Robb about what was going to happen after graduation, how they weren’t going see each other every day like they had been for the past decade, but it was a nice day, and _Robb_ was nice, never _not_ nice to him, and Theon hated seeing him upset. So out loud he hummed in disapproval and simply addressed the second part of the comment, “You watched most of those ‘pointless videos’ with me.”

“Well, yeah, so that our classmates didn’t suffer for nothing.” It worked and Robb laughed, and Theon chuckled too because of course Robb involved that quaint sense of honor of his. Then the sound of splashing cut off Robb’s laughing, and Theon looked over again to see that he had disappeared. A few seconds later, he rose back into view, dripping, forearms red and face flushed. 

Theon grinned.

“Don’t,” Robb groaned, coughing up water. “Don’t say anything.”

“I didn’t!”

“You were saying things with your face.”

“Uh huh. You slipped off.”

“I said _don’t_.”

“You’re amazing.”

“It’s _slippery_.”

“You’re in a pool, it’s slippery everywhere, idiot.”

He said it with a rush of fondness even as Robb flicked water at him again (droplets that Theon lazily halted in midair and sent sailing back towards Robb), the same fondness that would tint his voice nearly a year later as he told Robb to bring the biggest beach towel he could find and that Theon was the one making the three hour drive to the beach. It was the same fondness he felt when he saw Robb come out of his house with a ridiculously bright-colored beach towel in his arms, Grey Wind bounding close to his heels. It was the same fondness that would allow him to say _do_ _you want me to show you?_ when Robb later asked _could you part the sea if you wanted?_ and the same fondness that would allow him stay quiet when Robb took his hand before they walked into the water together, the same fondness that would allow him to ignore the way Grey Wind howled in warning back on the shore. Theon knows _now_ where that weakness can lead to, doesn’t he—

 

‘

 

Robb stops two steps into the room — he thinks two, anyway, because he doesn’t really know when the ground beneath him shifts from solid vinyl flooring to grass and twigs and tall plants that lap at his knees. He turns on instinct, but the doorway has vanished, replaced by trees and bushes that seem to repeat like that, endless, around him.

He has to crane his head upwards to look at the sky, following the tall trees that yawn upwards. The sky is stunningly blue.

“ _Do your best_ ,” crackles a voice, and Robb jolts when it seems to come from his body. He looks down, puzzled.

“Tyrion?” he asks, finally spotting a blinking red light by one of the buckles on his shoulder. He thumbs over the light and feels something small, like a pebble, embedded into the uniform. Some sort of mic? “Where do I go?”

The light continues to blink at him, but the voice doesn’t come again.

_You can’t keep relying on him_ , he tells himself. _Come on, you’ve been home alone with Arya, Bran, and Rickon before any of their tenth birthdays. This should be a piece of cake._

He starts walking without any particular direction in mind. 

He’s not sure what to look out for, either. He’s expecting to be thrown into a tree or something similar. Then he can say that he didn’t feel the impact, just like he didn’t feel that bench splintering against his arm, and Tyrion can say _Congratulations, your mutation is that you have numbed pain receptors_ or _super strength_ or something. Both prospects might have excited him before, when he didn’t know what it feels to actually _have_ such power, but now he instead hopes it’s something trivial like, _if you’re on ice you become stronger._ That’s at least something he can control. (He’d quit hockey, never go ice skating again, he’d just come to Jon’s games and sit in the back.)

He doesn’t expect one of the trees to start whirring and rotating, its roots crunching as they’re yanked mercilessly from the ground, its trunk splitting open down the middle to reveal a… a glowing ball of orange?

Robb stares — his instincts scream _run run run_ but there’s something else, a familiar buzzing in the back of his head that travels down his neck, over his shoulders, into his arms, his hands— He looks down and they’re glowing too, his palms, a soft eggshell yellow with edges that pulse and blur like the ball inside the tree.

A soft noise catches his attention— No, that’s not it, it’s not really _soft,_ just distant and dampened, two layers removed from realtime and Robb is confused until he looks up and sees the tree’s core rippling.

This is how it sounds: a _zzmmmm_ that slices through the air as cleanly as the accompanying streak of white, jagged light that shoots out from the tree. Robb doesn’t react in time, and he’ll think later that perhaps he wasn’t meant to, and the bolt of energy catches him in the right shoulder and sends him flying back. 

It is a queer sensation to be electrocuted, what feels like a thousand needles striking his skin all at once, each one bringing high, singing pain. Then the sensation shallows out, flattens into something surface-level as if repelled, the same way an apple fights to bob back up to the surface when pushed too deep. 

For a split second, the pain is completely gone — not that Robb has time to notice, because it’s quickly replaced by the hard, blunt pain of being slammed against the trunk of another tree. His head snaps back and hits bark, and his vision rings and his ears swim ( _is it the other way around?_ ) and for a terrifying moment he thinks he’s going to die.

This is what really happens: He doesn’t die. The pain is there, and it hurts, and it ebbs away. Inexplicably, he thinks of Theon cradling his face with both hands, and then he opens his eyes. The tree he has slumped against is beginning to move, and he’s being half-carried along by the heavy dragging motion. 

“Tyrion?” he croaks. He forgets which shoulder has the microphone, but he hopes Tyrion can hear him nonetheless. “Tyrion, it hurts, what’s happening?”

There’s no answer.

He tries and fails several times to get a grip as the roots pull up and slither loosely over grass, until the tree finally stops. The sound of a familiar whirring makes his eyes fly wide open, and Robb practically throws himself off to the side without thinking about how he might break his nose from the fall. He lands on his front, the side of his head taking the brunt of the impact, and he thinks that’s going to bruise.

_Zzmmmm._

He rolls over, landing hard on bent elbows, to see the split-open tree smoking from the most recently fired shot. (He would have taken a broken nose over being burnt to a crisp, he decides.)

He looks to his left, to the first tree, and sees its core starting to dim. He turns back to the second tree and sees that its core is starting to dim too.

“Tyrion!” he repeats, louder, and he can’t help the panic that seeps into his voice. Once again, he receives no answer.

_He’s trying to kill me_ , he thinks hollowly. _He didn’t even need Margaery’s powers, I walked into this one all on my own. Gods, I’m an_ idiot.

He thinks, _What would Jon think? Sansa, Bran?_ and then, finally, _What would Father think?_

He hears more harsh ripping. Somewhere, a third tree is turning.

Terror and rage alike flare within him. Perhaps that’s what he feels in his throat, or perhaps it’s his heart that’s leapt up and lodged in there. It’s certainly what catapults him to his feet with surprising energy and sends him running.

A third bolt strikes the spot he occupied just seconds before. 

_Not real_ , he tells himself. _Just simulated, not real, not real, not real not realnotrealnotrealnotreal—_

The scent of burnt wood smells real. The dirt caked on his hands and his arms is real.

Luckily, he’s good at running. His adrenaline must be pumping because he doesn’t feel any aching where there definitely should be, only the feeling of leaves and twigs crackling under his feet. His old football coach would have been proud of him, the way he weaves through the trees and leaps over roots without pause, not even when the occasional branch snaps against his shoulders, arms, thighs.

He’s so good at running that he doesn’t notice Theon until he crashes right into him. 

Newton’s first law of motion dictates that Theon, a stationary form looking distractedly somewhere beyond the trees, is compelled to motion when Robb, an external force fueled by blind terror, barrels into his side. Momentum carries them onwards, a mix-up of limbs, and gravity does the rest. Robb ends up barely catching himself on a palm and a forearm. He winces; he feels the burn through the fabric of the uniform, and it feels real for the few seconds it lasts.

“Robb?” Theon’s staring up at him with open concern, seemingly unhurt from the fall. This is his first clue. Robb doesn’t notice. “Where the hell did you come from?”

Robb scrambles off of him, ignoring the warmth pooling in his cheeks and the back of his neck and all the way down his body, warmest where he brushes against Theon. He instinctively balls his hands into fists to hide his still-glowing palms. “What are _you_ doing here?” he shoots back.

_Now you need to take a fucking hint,_ Theon had said, words that cleaved and cleaved. _I don’t want you near me._

Robb tells himself he shouldn’t be worried about his tone hurting Theon because Theon hurt _him_ first, didn’t he, damn it. Here a new kind of anger swells (he feels dizzy with emotion, have his senses always been this heightened?) and inspires him to glare at Theon.

Theon climbs to his feet, slowly. Then he steps towards Robb. This is his second clue. Robb doesn’t notice. “I just got here,” he says slowly, like he’s talking to some frightened animal, and Robb feels the angriest he’s ever felt at Theon. “Tyrion thought you were in trouble and sent me in after you.”

The mention of Tyrion brings back the other kind anger, and terror with it. 

Robb feels sick, but then it’s just another emotion to add to the swarm. He wants to lie down— No, he wants to get away from Theon first just like Theon wants and _then_ lie down, but the trees might start turning again— “Tyrion sent you?” Theon is clad in the same uniform, so Robb assumes yes.

Theon nods. “Just now. Look,” he’s worried, an unfamiliar look on him, “there’s something wrong with the danger room — Tyrion’s been trying to pull you out for the past few minutes, but there’s some kind of glitch and he can’t.”

Robb swallows. What should he feel — relief that Tyrion might not be trying to kill him after all or intensified terror at the prospect of being stuck here indefinitely? “What kind of glitch?” 

“I don’t know. He didn’t exactly have time to explain,” Theon says wryly. “He just sent me in to get you out.”

_Why would Tyrion think it was a good idea to send you?_ he wonders, but he remembers that Tyrion has no idea about their history. “I just almost— died,” he confesses, though he’s not quite sure why. It’s hard to push off his tongue, and if this were anyone else, the words would have never made it out in the first place. There’s a sense of shame to it — _I trusted the wrong person_ and _I didn’t know what to do_ and _if I knew what my mutation was I could have used it to fight back instead of running._ Shame and other weaknesses have always been things he trusted only Theon with, through whispered confessions in the dark, and it seems that it still rings true when Robb is livid with him. “The trees, they shot at me.” He realizes it sounds ridiculous and he can’t waste time explaining, so he changes course: “Tyrion said none of this is real but the pain I felt, it was _real_. Maybe that’s the glitch.”

“You felt real pain?” Theon’s dark eyes are trained on him.

Robb hesitates, but only because something feels strange. “Yes.”

Theon closes the distance between them and reaches out. Robb flinches, hyperaware of anything that comes flying towards him, but Theon’s hand goes around and cups the back of his head instead. “You’re bleeding.” When he withdraws his hand, his fingers are tipped red.

Robb stares. _Blood?_ It seems too bright, too red. _Mine?_

“You’re hurt.” Theon’s voice is soft, gentle, yet he looks very different up close. Has he always looked this blank and impassive? Before Robb can question it, Theon says, “I think you should follow me.” He steps back and begins to walk away, but then he pauses and looks back, clearly waiting for Robb to follow. It’s his third clue. Robb doesn’t notice. He thinks it’s the best idea he’s heard all day, and the sight of Theon waiting for him is a good one, sends something warm blanketing over his anger. 

He follows. Theon leads them through the thicket as Robb’s heart tries to calm down from its rapid beating, but at least no more trees are firing at them now. After a while, he realizes that the trembling isn’t just from his hammering heart, but in the ground. “Do you feel that?” he dares to call after Theon. (When did it switch from _don’t want you near me_ to _follow me_ , after all?) When Theon doesn’t answer, he asks instead, “Where are we going?”

Shouldn’t they do something about his head? If he’s bleeding…

He touches the back of his head himself. His hand comes away clean.

“Trust me,” Theon says, still not looking back.

Robb does.

When they break out of the treeline, they step onto sand, and Robb realizes that they’re on some sort of island. There’s a wreckage of a submarine to their right and a tall, smoking mountain on their left and sand under their feet and a glittering blue ocean ahead of them. 

Everything might look more beautiful if the ground wasn’t rumbling more prominently. 

Over the mountain, clouds hang like heavy gray smoke, and Robb thinks they’re storm clouds until he catches a glimpse of bright-hot orange near the top of the mountain.

_Mountain?_

“Theon,” he says, slowing to a stop, “is that a…”

There’s more orange—orange and yellow and red, bright shades of each, clumping together at the top and spilling in big, thick rivulets down the mountainside. There’s something off about it, because Robb has seen videos of volcanic eruptions and he’s never seen it happen so leisurely. Is that what volcanoes even look like? _You’ve never seen one in real life, so what makes you think you know what’s right and wrong?_

“That’s a volcano. Tyrion probably programmed it in as part of your test, but we’re using it for something else.” He begins walking _towards_ the volcano. 

What if this is part of Tyrion’s plan? Robb glances down at the blinking red light by his shoulder, as if expecting to hear Tyrion deny it, but Tyrion would hardly reveal his true intentions to them now, would he? “Theon, wait—“

“Don’t worry. It’s not erupting yet.”

Robb looks up, and in a blink, the reds and yellows and oranges are suddenly slate gray and the volcano is merely smoking. He stops and stares, something wrong tugging at the back of his mind, but if Theon says to trust him, then Robb will.

“The danger room operates by altering the sensory information that you take in,” Theon says. He sounds too…formal, too mechanical. “It’s all simulated, but it also relies on a degree of realism — the more you believe that the scenario is logical and _could_ happen in real life, the more immersed your mind is.”

Robb tries to process all of this. “What are you trying to get at?”

“I think we should jump in the volcano.”

He gapes. “ _What?_ ”

“Well, we don’t have to jump right in.” Abruptly, Theon grabs his hand, and Robb feels himself flush. “Just wait for the lava to come to us, then step in it. See, it’s even here already.” He flicks his head to the side, and Robb follows his gaze to see the thick foam of lava breaking through the treeline, obliterating the trees and shrubs and flowers in its way. He’s not sure how it moved so fast — wasn’t the volcano just smoking before, and here it is now, pushing lava forth—

He should tell Theon he’s insane. Theon could be working with Tyrion, for all he knows.

_No._ Theon wouldn’t try to hurt him on purpose, he’s nothing like Tyrion and he _promised_ once, when he first showed Robb what his hands could do with water _._

“Hey, come on.” Theon tugs on his hand, brings him back to the present. “I told you to trust me, didn’t I?”

Their fight and the past two years and his anger seem to lose importance completely, and Robb slowly nods. “I do,” he mutters. “Just… Why do we have to do it?”

“Would you ever, under normal circumstances, step into lava?” Theon asks.

“No.” This doesn’t help Robb’s confusion at all. 

“That’s exactly why we have to do it. If we do something so illogical, the simulation won’t be able to keep fooling your senses. If it doesn’t work, the pain will be so intense anyway that the simulation will break.”

Robb shouldn’t agree to it. He felt the pain before, so doesn’t that mean he will feel the pain that Theon is describing too? 

He realizes he’s afraid of it. (He wishes he wasn’t, but if Sansa and Arya and Bran and Rickon aren’t here, maybe it’s okay to be, just a little.)

“Is it illogical to _you_?” he asks.

“You’re letting me hold your hand,” Theon says with a wry grin, “it’s illogical enough.”

_It doesn’t have to be,_ Robb thinks on a whim.

“Doesn’t it?” Theon asks, musing, and Robb almost tears his hand away in mortification when he realizes he must have said it out loud—didn’t he? He can’t remember saying it, but how else would Theon have known? “Tell you what, we can test that _after_ we’re out of here.” Theon’s smirking, a tilt of his lips that doesn’t quite reach his blank eyes.

If this is odd, it doesn’t diminish the hope that flutters in Robb’s chest. “Yeah?”

Theon squeezes his hand. They’re skin-to-skin there, and Robb’s palms are still glowing but Theon hasn’t said a word about them. “Yeah.”

Theon isn’t running away from the confession, and suddenly it seems to matter very little that he’s walking towards the hissing lava because he’s walking _with_ Robb.

This is his last clue. Robb doesn’t notice.

 

‘

 

Tyrion watches with a soft, sad smile as a young, dark-haired woman leads Robb Stark towards the lava. The monitor doesn’t offer the best quality, but he would know her anywhere. He wonders who Robb Stark sees, who he would follow into molten fire.

“So this is all just according to plan, right,” Bronn says. Tyrion wonders who _he_ sees too.

“Of course,” he affirms as he spots Theon Greyjoy finally emerge from the wreckage of the submarine.

“You’ve never interfered this much before,” Bronn drawls. “Why now?”

“I have a soft spot for Theon.” Though gods forbid that Theon ever heard him say so. “And hearing those two’s thoughts about each other almost makes me wish I wasn’t a telepath.”

 

‘

 

Theon has tried calling out, asking politely, bargaining, shouting, threatening, _and_ shouting while threatening. None of these methods have earned him an answer from whoever the _fuck_ thought it was a fantastic idea to merge their danger room session with his.

It’s dangerous, first of all — he doesn’t know what their settings are and whether he should be wary of robots suddenly bursting from the trees trying to blast him to pieces. Second of all, this is _his_ program, something he spent hours making. He never had his own room — he doesn’t count the one he shared with Asha, because she never even took her things when she moved out — and this place is the closest to a private space that he’s ever had.

When he first realized that the simulation had expanded, he thought it was Renly — the submarine wreckage that suddenly materialized to his left was a detail that Renly insisted on including in their training program each time, but the volcano that similarly winked into existence was not something neither he nor Renly wouldever willingly program in. They were both wary of using elements they had little control over, especially when they would be accompanied by other students — that included fire. Theon honestly didn’t care for more than half of the school’s population, but he didn’t openly want to see them get hurt, either.

But if not Renly, who else?

His attempts to capture the attention of whomever was running the program had gone unnoticed, or ignored, and for the first time, he actually regretted not wearing the uniform — the mic would have been the surest way to communicate with them.

The best option finally appeared to be to find the intruders himself, then tell them to get out. 

He _could_ have stayed where he was, and if it was a training session, he could wait it out, maybe even entertain himself by watching the students fumble around. They would eventually leave, and their program would end, and the submarine would fizzle away, and his beach would become his beach again, smooth, unmarred.

A few minutes after the rumbling of the volcano began (and, presumably, the erupting), Theon decided he didn’t want to wait. 

Now he moves towards the wreckage, glimpsing the thick column of smoke curling from the top of the volcano. By the time he reaches the submarine, he catches a whiff of burnt wood.

He hopes that whoever else is here had the common sense to check the sensitivity levels. His program is running on the highest (it’s the only way the beach feels realistic), but a training session on a high sensitivity usually meant very real pain and, more than likely, very real bruises. 

Maybe it’s Jon and his friends — they seem like the type to feel stupidly brave and run through a dangerous simulation, Theon thinks. In that case, he’s surprised they opted for a volcano instead of badly animated giants. 

He picks his way around the wreckage, which spans the stretch of sand between the ocean and the treeline. He chooses to loop around on the side of the ocean, of course, and he doesn’t mind when the water laps at his bare feet. _It’s been a while since I went on a swim,_ he thinks idly. He decides he will, after he’s taken care of his current problem. 

The volcano is sparking in earnest by the time he finally emerges from the wreckage. Evidently, it’s already spat fire; he sees more columns of smoke past the trees, where one or two are probably in flames. The lava is pouring, some of it solidifying into a dark gray color as it seeps into the water. Theon feels another stab of anger when he sees it reach the beach. This is more than just an intrusion of his space, it’s a _corruption_. 

He spots two figures in the distance, far closer to the lava than he would be comfortable with. He frowns when he sees them simply standing there — can’t they see they’re about to be swallowed up?

Theon starts towards them, calling out, “Hey, idiots!” 

A few seconds later, he realizes he’s not getting any closer to them because they’re walking in the opposite direction. _Towards the lava?_ Theon thinks, bewildered, as he sees that they don’t seem to be in any hurry either. He speeds up to a jog, sparing the burning treeline a concerned glance. 

“Hey,” he calls one last time, and he’s close enough now to see that the two are holding hands. 

_Shit, are they on a date?_

It seems like a shit date idea, to enter a dangerous simulation together, but not completely unheard of. Theon starts to feel even more insulted that his space has been defiled by a bunch of horny teenagers, but then— Then he starts to recognize the back of their heads.

One is easy enough: It’s Robb. Theon hasn’t realized that his hair has gotten longer ( _what do you expect after two years?)_ but it can’t be anyone else. 

The other takes more time: He’s seen it countless times when he still lived at the house and constantly had to sneak past the couch, relying on the mindless noise of the television to drown out the sound of his footsteps. It’s his father, and questions of _why is he here_ and _why is he wearing a uniform_ are drowned out by the much louder, _why is he holding Robb’s hand?_

“Robb,” Theon sputters, stopping just short of them. 

At first, neither of the pair notices, and Theon’s anger melts away to a sudden fear he hasn’t felt in years when he fully registers that this is his _father_ and he’s right there, next to Robb, and Theon won’t be able to reach them in time if his father decides to— to—

“ _Robb_ ,” he repeats, more like a command this time, and finally, finally they turn.

Robb’s hands are glowing. There’s dirt on his uniform, a few scrapes on his cheek, and a blooming bruise on his lower jaw, an ugly gray like the ones Theon used to have to cover up. 

Balon Greyjoy is as withered and hateful as Theon remembers.

“Get the hell away from him,” he snarls to his father. “ _Let go of him, don’t touch him._ ”

Robb’s eyebrows draw together in confusion, his mouth parting to say something—he looks at Theon, then at Balon Greyjoy, then at Theon again.

“Robb, _come here_.” Theon can’t help how his voice rises higher in urgency. His father must have threatened Robb, Theon thinks, that’s why he won’t move.

“Theon…?” Robb says slowly. Instead of moving away ( _or at least letting go of his fucking hand_ ) he looks between them again, only this time his gaze hangs on Balon instead. It’s almost like he’s looking to him for guidance, and Theon feels bile rising in his throat. _What is happening?_

“He’s not real,” Balon Greyjoy tells Robb. Theon shudders when he hears that voice. “It’s an illusion. One of the danger room’s tricks.”

“What did you just say?” Theon rounds on his father with a new defiance — he can’t hurt him now that they’re here, in Theon’s space, where Theon knows how to use his powers and they’re surrounded by water and his father is only ignorant in comparison. 

Then something clicks — the mention of the danger room. This is a simulation, it’s not real, and maybe his father isn’t either— Is Robb? _But they’re both wearing the uniform._

There’s a red blinking light by Robb’s shoulder. _The mic._

There’s no such thing on his father’s.

A projection? Or one of the shapeshifting robots?

“Robb,” Theon says, more controlled this time. It helps to know that Balon Greyjoy isn’t real, but the sight of him anywhere near Robb still makes his stomach twist. He can’t protect Robb if his father is physically closer to him than Theon is.

(Does it matter if his father is really there or not, though, because Robb can clearly see who it is, and yet _he_ _still isn’t moving_ —) 

“You need to calm down, Theon,” his father says. If Theon hasn’t figured out already that he isn’t real, that would tip him off — his father never _said_ anything, he _commanded_ and he threatened and then he made good on his threats. He never used Theon’s name either, it was _boy_ and _mutie_ and _freak_.

Theon swallows and fights the urge to obey. That’s in his past. He’s older now, Balon has no control over him. _It’s not real._ “ _He’s_ the trick,” he says, forcing his eyes to lock with Robb’s so he doesn’t have to look at Balon. “Just think about it, Robb, why the hell would my father be here?”

“What?” The confusion deepens in Robb’s expression, and Theon desperately makes a grab for him but Robb wrenches himself back two steps. His hand at least falls away from Balon’s grip, but he’s also two steps closer to the lava still crawling towards them. “Tyrion, is this—“ He’sclutching at the buckle on his shoulder, at the mic.

Tyrion? Is that who put Robb in here? Why? _I thought you were supposed to be a genius, Lannister_.

“No,” Robb says with a shake of his head, his hands falling away to his side. “No, neither of you are real, this is— this is a test.”

“He’s not real. _I’m_ real,” his father says.

There’s too much going on—the air is thickening with smoke, the lava is less than two more steps away from Robb, and somewhere behind him he hears the sound of metal groaning. Theon glances back — a burning tree has fallen onto the submarine. The fire burns on, and Theon dreads the consequences of that huge mass of metal and wires catching on fire, but it’s rather easy to decide what his priority is. Robb is too far away to grab, but he’s also distanced from Balon now.

Theon closes his eyes and reaches out to the mass of water by their side. The connection is almost instantaneous; he’s done this often enough. It usually feels like dipping his cupped hands into water and bringing out a handful of it.

This time, though, it feels like he has dipped his hand into the water and brought the entire ocean back with him. He almost staggers when he opens his eyes and sees the bulk of water he draws from the ocean; he’s never summoned so much at once before. He should be barely able to control it, yet he marvels at how _easy_ it is to manipulate. _There’s so much power,_ he thinks faintly. 

I _have so much power._

It frightens him.

The amorphous glob of water hangs in midair, easily four times his size and more than powerful enough to knock a grown man off his feet—which is exactly what he sends it to do.

The water slams into Balon Greyjoy hard from the side, sending him pitching forward onto his knees. Theon then bends the stream upwards with one practiced motion, and it arches into the air just before it touches Robb _(who flinches with a terror that Theon is not proud of)._ Theon brings it trailing around in a semi-circle, waiting until he feels it just above him before slamming it forward again. It hits his target, and Balon Greyjoy is catapulted backwards, well into the rush of lava coming to greet them. When he lands, Theon absurdly expects a splash. Instead, the lava sort of warps around the new object, then swallows it as easily as it would swallow a tree. Then Balon Greyjoy, real or not, is gone.

Theon doesn’t count on Robb’s reaction. “ _Theon!”_ he cries out, and the sheer distress in his voice makes Theon falter because Robb isn’t reaching for him, he’s reaching for the projection of his father, quickly disappearing in the liquid fire.

Theon’s stupor lasts for all of a second when he realizes that Robb is pitching himself straight towards the lava, and he yanks the water back so fast that it actually hurts his head. That flash of pain doesn’t matter, though. The stream makes a one-eighty and comes shooting back with a speed that shouldn’t be possible for its mass, hitting Robb square in the chest just before he takes a step into the lava, and _that’s_ what matters, that Robb is being shoved back and away from a full-body, third-degree burn.

Theon moves forward without thinking about it. He’s off-balance from the shift in concentration, but he manages to catch Robb’s arm with the intention of stopping the fall. He doesn’t succeed entirely; Robb still crashes to the ground, only he takes Theon down with him. Theon lands hard on top of him, their arms and legs knocking painfully together, and he hears Robb’s breath leave him in one gasp. He thinks, _oh shit shit shit if the lava didn’t kill him then I did._

The fall breaks his concentration, and he feels his hold on the water snap. He barely has time to curl in towards Robb, as if to shield him at least from this one thing. 

The water crashes over his back.

Seconds later, when he pushes himself up on his elbows, his hair drips water onto Robb’s cheeks. Robb blinks when one lands particularly close to his eye, and Theon might have chuckled at the wide-eyed, baffled look on his face if he wasn’t suddenly being shoved to the side. 

It’s his turn to have his breath knocked out of him as he lands on his back, the blue-and-gray sky flashing into view for a few seconds before Robb is on top of him and punching him solidly.

Maybe it’s just Robb’s glowing hand, but Theon’s sure he sees actual stars, and not in a good way. Robb must have gotten stronger too because the punch fucking _hurts_.

“Robb,” he gets out. He means to ask what the hell that was for, but he doesn’t get to.

Robb’s hands land on his chest, not in a good way either, and curl into the front of his shirt. Theon has dreamed of this before too, of Robb bent sweetly on top of him while Theon runs his hands reverently down his back, but this isn’t a dream. “Bring him back!” Robb snarls with a viciousness that takes Theon by surprise. Robb shakes him, and sand flies. “ _Bring him back._ ” His voice cracks, and Theon realizes there’s something wet trailing down his cheek that isn’t saltwater. 

Well, okay, that hurts too, seeing Robb in tears over— over who, his piece of shit father? When Theon just saved him?

“He wasn’t real,” Theon says one last time, speaking past the lump in his throat. “ _I’m_ real, Robb, do you have to punch me again to feel it?” He shouldn’t have a right to be indignant, he thinks, when he’s made himself so scarce for so long that _anyone_ might have doubted his existence, but, selfishly, he never thought Robb would be one of them.

Above him, Robb’s shoulders slump at the question. His grip loosens. He looks like he’s about to fall over from exhaustion. “He felt real too,” Robb whispers.

“I know. That’s how everything here is supposed to feel.” Theon slips one of his arms free and, carefully, places it on Robb’s shoulder. He pushes, just slightly. “Including the lava. And if you don’t move, you’re going to get us burned to a crisp.”

The lava isn’t real either, but Theon still isn’t sure how permanent the physical repercussions will be. No one’s died in a danger room session before, but a few have been seriously injured.

The statement finally inspires Robb to move. He pushes himself stiffly off of Theon, stumbling a little as he climbs to his feet. Theon sees his hands fidget, and he lets himself entertain the idea that Robb wants to help him up.

Theon stands up by himself.

If the projection of his father had a physical form to burn, it has been long destroyed by the lava. He thinks he sees Robb looking for it too, though he still doesn’t know _why_.

He begins moving away from the lava, only to stop when he sees he’s the only one doing so. Robb continues to stare at the sea of red-yellow, though his expression has become something less searching and more thoughtful. Theon decides he doesn’t like it. “Robb,” he says, “we have to go.”

“Where?” Robb turns to him. The tear tracks are drying on his cheeks, and he sounds very, very tired. Theon stares at his bruise and wondering if he now has a matching one of his own. “We’re stuck.”

He’s right. The lava is closing in on them, the trees are up in flames, and the submarine is making odd, crackling noises as the fire devours it. “We’re also going to be corpses if you don’t move right now.”

Robb doesn’t answer, and Theon feels a surge of impatience. “If you don’t move, I’m going without you,” he says as firmly as he can, even though his heart jumps at the mere _thought_ of leaving Robb here.

“You’ve already done that,” Robb says, and he looks like he’s going to cry again.

Theon struggles not to avert his eyes—he knows he owes Robb that much, but he can’t, _can’t_ stand to see Robb upset, can’t stand knowing he’s the reason why. He puts out the last thing he can offer: “If you die, I won’t get to tell you why I left.”

He knows Robb won’t die, just like he knows he has no intention of reminding him why he ran, but that’s the purpose of the danger room—to make everything feel as real as possible. His offer sounds real. The idea of Robb dying seems real.

To Robb, it evidently sounds real too. “You’re real,” he says, as if seeking confirmation as he moves away from the lava and towards Theon at last. 

Theon thinks it’s a good sign. “I’m real.”

Robb exhales shakily, and Theon resists the urge to hold onto some part of him — his arm or his elbow or his hand (and rub away the traces of his father, he still doesn’t know why Robb was holding his hand—). Together, they put some distance between them and the lava, not stopping until they’re the closest to the submarine they can get without being caught in its sparks.

Robb looks to him. “We need to get in the water.”

Theon is quick to say, “No.”

He would have no qualms if it was just him, but Robb is here, staring at the ocean with far less fear than he would feel if he remembered how it felt to drown. 

(Sometimes, Theon finds himself wishing he would remember, but he’s a coward and always wishes harder that Robb would not.) 

“You could do it,” Robb insists. The moving lava is still a worrying sight, but at least it isn’t on their heels anymore. “Can’t you?” Robb pauses, eyebrows twitching. Theon recognizes the micro-expression: He’s trying to remember something. “Part the sea, or something,” he mumbles.

It’s the worst thing he could propose. Theon shakes his head firmly. “No. We can’t risk it.” He doesn’t explain give further explanation, instead asking, “Did Tyrion send you in here?”

Robb did say his name earlier. It would make sense. Robb can’t have an access code to any of the danger rooms yet, nor would he know how to program a session. Someone else must have done it for him, and none of his siblings have access codes except Jon, and Theon can’t imagine that he would willingly put Robb in danger like this.

Robb nods. “This was supposed to test my…my mutation.”

Tyrion can’t have done it on purpose. Robb doesn’t look like he knows any better what his mutation is, and he probably doesn’t, given the disaster that Theon has witnessed in the past few minutes. If Tyrion was trying to figure out Robb’s mutation, he’s done a shit job so far. “Come here.” Theon beckons him over, and Robb stares at him like he has just grown a second head. “Robb.” He lets himself sound impatient, because he doesn’t think Robb will respond otherwise. “I mean it.”

When Robb comes closer, Theon sees that his cheeks are flushed red for reasons that Theon doesn’t know.

As soon as he’s close enough, Theon grabs the strap on his shoulder. Robb makes a strangled noise of surprise when Theon yanks him so close that their cheeks brush, and Theon imagines Robb’s face going redder when he leans in and enunciates, “Pyke.”

Reality shifts.

 

‘

 

Reality settles. 

The lights power on, and they’re standing in the gridded danger room, Theon’s clothes still well-soaked and Robb’s face still red.

Theon draws back, though not far. His eyes catch on the bruise still on Robb’s face, and he frowns, instinctively putting a hand up to touch it, but Robb moves before he can, twisting out of his grip and taking a few good steps backwards.

Theon tells himself again that he has no right to feel hurt at the wariness in Robb’s eyes. It’s a natural reaction. He’s probably still reeling from that mess of a simulation.

To their side, the circular door slides open, and Theon isn’t surprised to see Tyrion and Bronn walking into the danger room to join them. “You safeworded,” Tyrion says, curiously.

“Safeworded?” Robb echoes distantly.

“You’re not hurt,” Tyrion says, and it’s his plain, unconcerned tone that sets Theon off.

“ _I’m_ not hurt,” he says, slowly and clearly so Tyrion understands, “but do you see _him_?” He jabs a finger at Robb, who Tyrion doesn’t seem to notice. “What the hell were you thinking, sending him into my session? My sensitivity was on the highest setting, or did you not see that while you were apparently adding a _volcano_ in?”

“First of all,” Tyrion says levelly, “I did know about the sensitivity level, yes, because I made it explicitly clear in my rules that no one is to use the highest setting without my express permission.” Theon flushes a little at being called out, but doesn’t flinch. This is Tyrion’s fault. “Secondly, that was Robb’s ability check, and those elements were necessary to measure his strengths and weaknesses.”

“Measure his strengths and weaknesses?” Theon actually laughs, though he feels very far from being humorous. “You sent my— You put Balon in there!”

“I was testing Robb’s susceptibility to mental and emotional manipulation,” Tyrion says. “A test that — don’t take this the wrong way, it’s quite normal — you failed spectacularly, Robb. That was a very powerful silvertongue that I programmed in, although I never specified what form it would take.” He’s back to addressing Theon now. “It was designed to recognize and resemble the person you are most likely to be manipulated by.”

(A silvertongue. It would explain why he had to fight not to listen to his father.) “Bullshit,” he says immediately. “He has no power over me.”

If he saw his father, then who did Robb see…?

Theon glances him. Robb has suddenly turned quiet and is looking back at him with an undecipherable expression.

“Of course,” Tyrion says, and he doesn’t sound mocking like Theon expects him to be. His voice even softens when he says, “I didn’t expect you to have to face him. But yes. He doesn’t have any direct control over you, not anymore.”

It’s something they’ve gone over before. Yet his word choice makes Theon wonder—if not directly, then what other way?

“As for you, Robb,” Tyrion continues. “I know it probably seemed like I was trying to, ah, hurt you you on purpose—“

“Really,” Robb mutters.

“—but I promise that I was not and I am not. My intention was to help. I’m sorry about the extent of your injuries—“

“Oh, you’re _sorry_ ,” Theon says.

Tyrion sighs and glances at Bronn, and Theon can imagine them mentally communicating, _Do you see these kids’ lack of manners,_ or something condescending like that. “We’ve learned much about your ability, and I’d be happy to discuss those things with you in private, if you wish.”

Theon glances at Robb, who still looks like he just went through hell but has finally seen some light at the end of it. “Yes. I’d like that,” he says, sounding grateful. “I’m— I don’t know if you heard, but I’m sorry that I thought you… that I…”

“I know.” Tyrion smiles, sincere. “It was a logical thought process. You don’t have to apologize.” It’s the same tone he once used on Theon as he gently pried the bag of pills away from his hands.

“Okay.” Robb’s entire frame seems to slacken, and then he looks just as young as he is, worn and tired. “That’s good. Thank you.”

Then he crumples to the floor, and this time Theon isn’t quick enough to catch him.

 

‘

 

“Amplification,” Tyrion explains later, after Theon finishes shouting at him for being too careless and putting Robb in danger. He hands Theon a bag of ice, and Theon grudgingly accepts it as he listens. “He can absorb external forces of energy, store it, and use it to amplify others’ powers. That was how you were able to channel such a large body of water.”

Theon remembers the sheer power he felt. _What external force did he absorb to give me that much power?_ he wonders. He doesn’t think Tyrion would tell him if he asked, so he doesn’t. _I’ll ask Robb when he wakes up_ , he decides, then stops. He hasn’t thought like that in a while. It implies he’ll still be there when Robb wakes up.

He looks over to the infirmary bed, where Robb sleeps away peacefully.

His mutation seems…arbitrary, on the surface. Theon would have imagined him to have super strength, or something more…what’s the word for it, _offensive_ , active, like Jon’s pyrokinesis or Arya’s ferrokinesis, some power that belonged to a typical superhero, because Theon can’t think of anyone else who might suit such a role better. But then he thinks of Robb who drove his siblings to places, who ran groceries when his mother couldn’t, who helped bandaged Theon’s hands after fights, who changed ice packs every four hours for Theon's bruises, who confided in Theon once, _Sometimes I don’t think I can handle what everyone expects me to,_ and he changes his mind and thinks maybe this ability suits Robb too.

“You should stay,” Tyrion tells him. “I have a feeling you two have a lot to talk about.” His tone hints that it’s more than just a feeling, and it dawns on Theon that Tyrion saw everything that happened in the session. Did Tyrion know who Robb saw in that projection, then?

_Another thing I can ask Robb_ , he thinks, putting the ice pack to his cheek. He winces at the cold, even though it’s something he should be used to by now. _If I stay._

“Like what happened on that beach,” Tyrion suggests further. “And I don’t mean the one you were just in.”

Easier said than done. Theon appreciates the thought, though. (He appreciates Tyrion. What he’s done for him.)

He makes no promises about the second part, but he does murmur, “Yeah, I’ll stay,” before sinking into one of the chairs by the bed. Maybe it’s the image he sees when he closes his eyes, of Robb standing there about to be devoured by a sea of red that makes him say so. His hands are still shaking a little, because he can just as easily imagine the same thing with a sea of blue; he knows he doesn’t need to stay because Robb _is_ alive, but he’s starting to think that he wants an excuse to.

So he does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> guys we're not even at the thick of the plot yet, i can't believe how many words it's been already but i didn't just want robb&theon to make up immediately y'know ??

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for starting on this wild journey with me, folks :v


End file.
